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Tag Archives: survey
Alabama: Making of an American State
Alabama: the Making of an American State© 2016 Edwin C. Bridges264 pages In December of 2019, the streets of Montgomery were thronged with people as the citizens of Alabama celebrated its 200th anniversary. The three years prior had been full … Continue reading
Of Romans, manly saints, and the beginning of the end
I spent much of August crawling through the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I was very careful, in making my list, that I specified “Volume I”: I had little interest in trying … Continue reading
Posted in history, Reviews
Tagged "classic", Catholicism, history, Of Boys and Men, Rome, survey
7 Comments
Our Time Has Come
Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World © 2018 Alyssa Ayres360 pages The India of the 21st century is more than the word’s back office; by some measures, it has already overtaken Japan as the … Continue reading
Posted in Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews, World Affairs
Tagged Asia, India, politics, Politics-CivicInterest, survey
2 Comments
The Birth of Britain
History of the English Speaking Peoples, Vol 1: The Birth of Britain521 pages© 1956 Sir Winston Churchill I’ve been reading from Sir Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples the last few Read of Englands, but didn’t previously have … Continue reading
Posted in history, Reviews
Tagged Anglo-Saxons, Britain, history, survey, Winston Churchill
11 Comments
Ein Feste Burg
A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People© 2004 Steven Ozment314 pages Like many Americans, I first knew the Germans only as the villains of our world wars. It wasn’t until college, when over-full Spanish classes thrust me … Continue reading
The Wonder That Was India
The Wonder That Was India© 1959 Arthur Llewellyn Basham586 pages For the past few weeks I’ve been enjoying The Wonder That Was India, a Will Durant-like survey of Indian history and culture prior to the Mughal invasion. Its opening section … Continue reading
Romans Without Laurels
Romans Without Laurels© 1962 Indro Montanelli352 pages In Romans Without Laurels, Indro Montanelli delivers an affectionate history of the Roman Republic and the empire which followed. Although a work in translation, it succeeds wonderfully as narrative history, reminding and entertaining … Continue reading
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume I
Archipeleg GULag / The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary InvestigationVolume I (of III)© 1973, 1974 Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn660 pages Such was my desire to read The Gulag Archipelago that when I found it on the shelf and observed that it … Continue reading
Posted in Reviews
Tagged "classic", Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Classics and Literary, Classics Club Challenge, Gulag Archipelago, Man vs State, prisons, Russia, survey
7 Comments
A New History of India
A New History of India© 2000, sixth edition Stanley Wolpert471 pages India isn’t an easy place to keep running. Stanley Wolpert’s A New History of India gives a chiefly-political, mostly-modern history of one of the world’s most ancient civilizations, a land … Continue reading
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry© 2017 Neil deGrasse Tyson200 pages Astrophysics for People in a Hurry is exactly what it says on the tin, a brief cosmological primer that presents the basics of cosmology, explains the ways we are … Continue reading
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