Tag Archives: survey

Of Romans, manly saints, and the beginning of the end

Posted on September 4, 2019 by

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 →

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Our Time Has Come

Posted on January 30, 2019 by

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 →

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The Birth of Britain

Posted on April 16, 2018 by

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 →

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Ein Feste Burg

Posted on October 12, 2017 by

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 →

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The Wonder That Was India

Posted on September 1, 2017 by

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 →

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Romans Without Laurels

Posted on August 23, 2017 by

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 →

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The Gulag Archipelago, Volume I

Posted on August 12, 2017 by

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 →

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A New History of India

Posted on July 13, 2017 by

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 →

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Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Posted on May 7, 2017 by

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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Glimpses of World History

Posted on December 26, 2016 by

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 →

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