Everything Else
Amy Stanley — Travel to 1800s Japan in Stranger in the Shogun’s City (Book Review)
Amy Stanley is a professor and social historian who specializes in early modern Japan. In her 2020 book, Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, Stanley explores the story of a rebellious woman in a strict time. Her subject is Tsuneno, the...
Elizabeth M. Norman — We Band of Angels (Book Review)
Elizabeth Norman delivers everything I want from narrative nonfiction in her 2000 book We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese. It’s engaging and obviously well-researched, including many interviews with the women...
Ed West — Saxons vs. Vikings: A Compact but Extensive History (Book Review)
Saxons vs. Vikings is the first mini-history book on my shelf from Ed West. And it’s worthy of the subtitle: Alfred the Great and England in the Dark Ages. But it also contains interminable descriptions of battles and considering its brevity that’s saying a lot....
Mudlark by Lara Maiklem — Visit London Throughout the Ages (Book Review)
Lara Maiklem introduced me to a whole new world in Mudlark: In Search of London’s Past Along the River Thames. Not that I haven’t been to London. I have. She takes readers specifically to the foreshore of Britain’s iconic Thames, with all of its quirks and...
Hope Jahren — The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here (Book Review)
Hope Jahren developed the crux of The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where We Go from Here as an introductory class for college students. And fundamentally, it reads this way. There’s a lot of science, some history, a bit of humor, and a smattering of...
Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Book Review)
Shoshana Zuboff is a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, among other academic qualifications. And that informs everything about her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. It’s more academic than...
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