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Tag Archives: survey
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
6 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
Glimpses of World History
Glimpses of World History© 1942 Jawaharlal Nehru1192 pages In 1930, a man who would later become the first prime minister of India was thrown in jail for a period of two years. There, removed from his family and regretful that … Continue reading
Posted in history, Reviews
Tagged Asia, Central Asia, China, Europe, history, India, Middle East, survey
4 Comments
