Caroline's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 06 Apr 2025 03:58:57 -0700 60 Caroline's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr. Crippen]]> 215362556 This is the story of a murder, not a murderer . . .

In Story of a Murder, bestselling author of The Five and celebrated historian Hallie Rubenhold reexamines the events leading up to the infamous Crippen murder from the perspectives of the three women at the center of it all.

When Belle Elmore’s remains were discovered in the basement of London’s 39 Hilldrop Crescent in July 1910, the larger-than-life vaudevillian performer was launched into stardom she never achieved on the stage.

Story of a Murder provides an intricately plotted, intimate look into the lives of three multifaceted women living during a time of electric progress and stifling Crippen’s first wife, Charlotte, who died under mysterious circumstances; his mistress, Ethel, who claimed ignorance of his crime even as she escaped with Crippen disguised as his son; and Belle, the woman whose life Crippen took.

Throughout the twentieth century, the infamous Crippen murder was told in such a way as to cast doubt on Crippen's guilt and to victim-blame his wife Cora for her own murder. It also astonishingly depicted Crippen's younger mistress, Ethel, as innocent of any involvement in the killing of her love rival.

But new evidence unearthed by Rubenhold completely subverts this famous history, unravelling assumptions about the crime and deconstructing Edwardian beliefs about women, class aspiration, and the transatlantic world, ultimately proving that Charlotte, Belle, and Ethel were so much more than the passive victims history has portrayed them as.]]> 512 Hallie Rubenhold 0593184610 Caroline 0 4.32 2025 Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr. Crippen
author: Hallie Rubenhold
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: currently-reading, british-history, true-crime, women-s-history
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]]> <![CDATA[The Jamestown Brides: The Untold Story of England's 'Maids for Virginia']]> 41181621 While the women travelled of their own accord, the company was in effect selling them at a profit for a bride price of 150 lbs of tobacco for each woman sold. The rewards would flow to investors in the near-bankrupt company. But what did the women want from the enterprise? Why did they agree to make the dangerous crossing to a wild and dangerous land, where six out of seven European settlers died within their first few years - from dysentery, typhoid, salt water poisoning and periodic skirmishes with the native population? And what happened to them in the end?
Delving into company records and original sources on both sides of the Atlantic, Jennifer Potter tracks the women's footsteps from their homes in England to their new lives in Virginia. Giving voice to these forgotten women of America's early history, she triumphantly invites the reader to journey alongside the brides as they travel into a perilous and uncertain future.]]> 384 Jennifer Potter 1782399135 Caroline 3 3.45 2018 The Jamestown Brides: The Untold Story of England's 'Maids for Virginia'
author: Jennifer Potter
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/05
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]]> <![CDATA[Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War]]> 214986236 One historian’s journey to find the end of the Civil War—and, along the way, to expand our understanding of the nature of war itself and how societies struggle to draw the line between war and peace

We set out on the James River, March 25, 1865, aboard the paddle steamboat the River Queen. President Lincoln is on his way to General Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, and he’s decided he won’t return to Washington until he’s witnessed, or perhaps even orchestrated, the end of the Civil War. Now, it turns out, more than a century and a half later, historians are still searching for that end.
Was it April 9th, at Appomattox, as conventional wisdom holds, where Lee surrendered to Grant in Wilmer McLean’s parlor? Or was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed “Juneteenth� the end of slavery? Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end�? That the answer was elusive was baffling even to a historian of the stature of Michael Vorenberg, whose work served as the principal source of Spielberg’s Lincoln. He was inspired to write this groundbreaking book, finding its title in the peace Lincoln hoped for but could not make before his assassination. A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg discovers in these pages, the most important of which came well over a year after Lincoln’s untimely death.
To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and Vorenberg’s search is not just for the Civil War’s endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to American identity. It’s also a quest, in our age of “forever wars,� to understand whether the U.S.’s interminable conflicts of the current era have a precedent in the Civil War—and whether, in a sense, wars ever end at all, or merely wax and wane.]]> 480 Michael Vorenberg 1524733172 Caroline 0 4.31 Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War
author: Michael Vorenberg
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.31
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shelves: currently-reading, american-civil-war, american-history
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]]> <![CDATA[The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together]]> 53231851
McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across the country from Maine to Mississippi to California, tallying what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm--the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others. Along the way, she meets white people who confide in her about losing their homes, their dreams, and their shot at better jobs to the toxic mix of American racism and greed. This is the story of how public goods in this country--from parks and pools to functioning schools--have become private luxuries; of how unions collapsed, wages stagnated, and inequality increased; and of how this country, unique among the world's advanced economies, has thwarted universal healthcare.

But in unlikely places of worship and work, McGhee finds proof of what she calls the Solidarity Dividend: gains that come when people come together across race, to accomplish what we simply can't do on our own.

McGhee marshals economic and sociological research to paint a story of racism's costs, but at the heart of the book are the humble stories of people yearning to be part of a better America, including white supremacy's collateral victims: white people themselves. With startling empathy, this heartfelt message from a Black woman to a multiracial America leaves us with a new vision for a future in which we finally realize that life can be more than a zero-sum game.]]> 415 Heather McGhee 0525509569 Caroline 4 american-history, politics 4.62 2021 The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
author: Heather McGhee
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: american-history, politics
review:

]]> <![CDATA[White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity]]> 52764767 Drawing on history, public opinion surveys, and personal experience, Robert P. Jones delivers a provocative examination of the unholy relationship between American Christianity and white supremacy, and issues an urgent call for white Christians to reckon with this legacy for the sake of themselves and the nation.

As the nation grapples with demographic changes and the legacy of racism in America, Christianity’s role as a cornerstone of white supremacy has been largely overlooked. But white Christians—from evangelicals in the South to mainline Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast—have not just been complacent or complicit; rather, as the dominant cultural power, they have constructed and sustained a project of protecting white supremacy and opposing black equality that has framed the entire American story.

With his family’s 1815 Bible in one hand and contemporary public opinion surveys by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in the other, Robert P. Jones delivers a groundbreaking analysis of the repressed history of the symbiotic relationship between Christianity and white supremacy. White Too Long demonstrates how deeply racist attitudes have become embedded in the DNA of white Christian identity over time and calls for an honest reckoning with a complicated, painful, and even shameful past. Jones challenges white Christians to acknowledge that public apologies are not enough—accepting responsibility for the past requires work toward repair in the present.

White Too Long is not an appeal to altruism. Drawing on lessons gleaned from case studies of communities beginning to face these challenges, Jones argues that contemporary white Christians must confront these unsettling truths because this is the only way to salvage the integrity of their faith and their own identities. More broadly, it is no exaggeration to say that not just the future of white Christianity but the outcome of the American experiment is at stake.]]> 306 Robert P. Jones 1982122862 Caroline 0 to-read 4.42 2020 White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity
author: Robert P. Jones
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2020
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]]> <![CDATA[Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States]]> 433281
In the new edition Bonilla-Silva has added a chapter dealing with the future of racial stratification in America that goes beyond the white / black dichotomy. He argues that the U.S. is developing a more complex and apparently "plural" racial order that will mimic Latin American patterns of racial stratification. Another new chapter addresses a variety of questions from readers of the first edition. And he has updated the book throughout with new information, data, and references where appropriate. The book ends with a new Postscript, "What is to be Done (For Real?)". As in the highly acclaimed first edition, Bonilla-Silva continues to challenge color-blind thinking.]]> 288 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva 0742546861 Caroline 0 to-read 4.27 2003 Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States
author: Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/25
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]]> <![CDATA[Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine, 1845-1850]]> 816102
In 1845, a disaster struck Ireland. Overnight, a mysterious blight attacked the potato crops, turning the potatoes black and destroying the only real food of nearly six million people.

Over the next five years, the blight attacked again and again. These years are known today as the Great Irish Famine, a time when one million people died from starvation and disease and two million more fled their homeland.
Black Potatoes is the compelling story of men, women, and children who defied landlords and searched empty fields for scraps of harvested vegetables and edible weeds to eat, who walked several miles each day to hard-labor jobs for meager wages and to reach soup kitchens, and who committed crimes just to be sent to jail, where they were assured of a meal. It’s the story of children and adults who suffered from starvation, disease, and the loss of family and friends, as well as those who died. Illustrated with black and white engravings, it’s also the story of the heroes among the Irish people and how they held on to hope.]]> 192 Susan Campbell Bartoletti 0618548831 Caroline 0 to-read 3.97 2001 Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine, 1845-1850
author: Susan Campbell Bartoletti
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/23
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]]> <![CDATA[The New Age of Sexism: How Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny]]> 220481360 Misogyny is being hardwired into our future. Can we stop it?

We like to believe we’re moving closer to equality, riding the wave of technological progress into a brighter, fairer future. But beneath the glossy surface of innovation lies a chilling truth: new technologies are not just failing to solve age-old inequalities—they’re deepening them.

In The New Age of Sexism, acclaimed author and activist Laura Bates exposes how misogyny is being coded into the very fabric of our future. From the biases embedded in artificial intelligence to the alarming rise of sex robots and the toxic dynamics of the metaverse, Bates takes readers on a shocking journey into a world where technology is weaponized against women.

This isn’t a dystopian warning about what might happen. It’s a harrowing account of what’s happening now and the dangers we face if we don’t act. With clarity and urgency, Bates reveals how these advancements are dragging society backward, reinforcing harmful stereotypes, and jeopardizing decades of progress in the fight for gender equality.

Eye-opening and empowering, The New Age of Sexism is a rallying cry for awareness and action in a world where the battle for equality has entered a dangerous new frontier.]]> 336 Laura Bates 1464234361 Caroline 0 to-read 0.0 The New Age of Sexism: How Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny
author: Laura Bates
name: Caroline
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]]> <![CDATA[Confederate Sympathies: Same-Sex Romance, Disunion, and Reunion in the Civil War Era (Gender and American Culture)]]> 219290713 296 Andrew Donnelly 1469685582 Caroline 0 to-read 0.0 Confederate Sympathies: Same-Sex Romance, Disunion, and Reunion in the Civil War Era (Gender and American Culture)
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name: Caroline
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]]> <![CDATA[Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism]]> 198563691 Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel.

If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force makes it clear that the opposite is true: The U.S. school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives.

In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that our schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to “civilize� Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Education was not an afterthought for the Founding Fathers; it was envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as an institution that would fortify the country’s racial hierarchy. Ewing argues that these dynamics persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. The most insidious aspects of this system fall below the radar in the forms of standardized testing, academic tracking, disciplinary policies, and uneven access to resources.

By demonstrating that it’s in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day.]]> 400 Eve L. Ewing 0593243706 Caroline 0 to-read 4.60 2025 Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism
author: Eve L. Ewing
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/23
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]]> <![CDATA[The Jewish South: An American History]]> 213662800 A panoramic history of the Jewish American South, from European colonization to today

In 1669, the Carolina colony issued the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which offered freedom of worship to “Jews, heathens, and other dissenters,� ushering in an era that would see Jews settle in cities and towns throughout what would become the Confederate States. The Jewish South tells their stories, and those of their descendants and coreligionists who followed, providing the first narrative history of southern Jews.

Drawing on a wealth of original archival findings spanning three centuries, Shari Rabin sheds new light on the complicated decisions that southern Jews made—as individuals, families, and communities—to fit into a society built on Native land and enslaved labor and to maintain forms of Jewish difference, often through religious innovation and adaptation. She paints a richly textured and sometimes troubling portrait of the period, exploring how southern Jews have been targets of antisemitism and violence but also complicit in racial injustice. Rabin considers Jewish immigration and institution building, participation in the Civil War, the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, and Jewish support for and resistance to the modern fight for Black civil rights. She examines shifting understandings of Jewishness, highlighting both the reality of religious diversity and the ongoing role of Christianity in defining the region.

Recovering a neglected facet of the American experience, The Jewish South enables readers to see the South through the eyes of people with a distinctive religious heritage and a southern history older than the United States itself.]]> 296 Shari Rabin 069120876X Caroline 0 to-read 0.0 The Jewish South: An American History
author: Shari Rabin
name: Caroline
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]]> <![CDATA[After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe but Not Abortion]]> 215363225 How hard-working individuals have kept abortion afloat in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s destruction, and the continued help needed if we want to sustain it

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, many feared it meant the end of abortion access in the United States. Yet the courageous work of people on the ground has allowed abortion to survive post-Dobbs in ways that no one predicted.

In After Dobbs, law expert David Cohen and sociologist Carole Joffe interview 24 people across all different fields in abortion and in different state political environments to uncover how the abortion providing community and its allies prepared for, and then responded to this momentous event. Taking place across three intervals throughout 2022—pre-Dobbs in early 2022, right after Dobbs, and then six months later—these interviews showcase how nimble thinking on the part of providers, growth and new delivery models of abortion pills, and the never-ending work of those who help with abortion travel and funding have ensured most people who want them are still getting abortions, even without Roe.

But, as much as this is cause for celebration, the work required to make abortion possible is difficult and costly—in time, money, and emotion. There may soon come a time when the overturning of Roe means a much more severe decline in the number of people able to obtain the abortions they seek. But because of the work of the people in this book and those like them, even though Roe is dead, abortion is not . . . yet.]]> 248 David S. Cohen 0807017663 Caroline 0 to-read 0.0 After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe but Not Abortion
author: David S. Cohen
name: Caroline
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]]> <![CDATA[After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America]]> 220998886 An intersectional analysis of evangelical purity culture’s influence on gender, sexuality, race, and national identity in the United States.

With a foreword by Linda Kay Klein, author of Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free.

In After Purity, purity scholar Sara Moslener conducts a nuanced investigation of purity culture in white evangelical Christianity, revealing its profound impact on gender, sexuality, race, and national identity in the United States. Moslener shares exclusive stories of participants from her research on the After Purity Project to discuss how purity culture affected women—particularly white women—who grew up in the evangelical church. These stories depict how white supremacy has a hand in constructing idealized “traditional� or “biblical� views of family, white racial identity, sexuality, gender expression, and religion, and how our physical bodies are situated within systems of power and oppression.

With a blend of history, current research, and sustained analysis, Moslener explores how white evangelicalism has become so politically powerful, why gender and sexuality are positioned at the center of debate, and how those debates aim to obscure deeper histories of white evangelical racism. She describes the full disturbing effect of the “True Love Waits� movement and how purity teachings displaced all other forms of religious education in evangelicalism. From her interviewees in the After Purity Project, she shares stories of oppressive personal piety, sexual repression, disembodiment, self-hatred, mandatory hetero-normativity, and the many layers of obligation and shame in sexuality before reaching adulthood and navigating their way out of the church. Moslener also describes her own story of being a teen advocate for purity culture to becoming a researcher, scholar, and advocate for people harmed by purity.

After Purity provides a window into the world of white evangelicalism and how its leaders and political allies have manufactured socio-sexual panic to justify the elimination of sexual and religious diversity that thrive in a flourishing democracy.]]> Sara Moslener 0807014982 Caroline 0 to-read 5.00 After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America
author: Sara Moslener
name: Caroline
average rating: 5.00
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]]> <![CDATA[Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance]]> 214152270 In the tradition of When Time Stopped and The Hare with Amber Eyes, this extraordinary family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author’s great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist specializing in radioactive household products who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis.

When novelist and poet Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their heroic escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. Instead, what he found in his great-grandfather’s voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story. “I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error. I betrayed myself, my most sacred principles,� he wrote. “I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience.�

Siegfried Merzbacher was a German-Jewish chemist living in Oranienburg, a small town north of Berlin, where he developed various household items, including a radioactive toothpaste called Doramad. But then he was asked by the government to work on products with a strong military connection—first he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. Between 1933 and 1935, he was a Jewish chemist making chemical weapons for the Nazis. While he and his nuclear family escaped safely to Turkey before the war, Siegfried never got over his complicity, particularly after learning that members of his extended family were murdered in Auschwitz.

Armed only with his great-grandfather’s rambling, 2,000-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne traveled to Munich, Ammendorf, Berlin, Ankara, and Oranienburg—a place where hundreds of unexploded bombs remain hidden in the irradiated soil—to reckon with the remarkable, unsettling legacy of his family’s past.]]> 240 Joe Dunthorne 1982180757 Caroline 0 to-read 4.14 2025 Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance
author: Joe Dunthorne
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion]]> 215750298 The long history of how restricting access to abortion has been used to curtail women’s advancement

Attitudes about abortion cycle between long periods of widespread tolerance, to repression, and back again. What accounts for these pendulum swings? From ancient Greece to the modern West, historian of medicine Mary Fissell argues, abortion repression springs up in response to men’s anxieties about women’s increasing independence.

In Pushback, Fissell shows that, across centuries and continents, abortion has always been commonplace, and persecuting women for ending pregnancies has been about controlling their behavior. As Protestantism de-emphasized celibacy, new abortion restrictions policed unmarried women’s sex lives. Nineteenth-century men unsettled by first-wave feminism hoped to establish medicine as a male profession, and so advocated for abortion bans to undercut women’s new roles as physicians. Fissell presents this history through the hidden stories of women committed to reproductive holy women of the early Catholic Church whose ability to end pregnancies was considered miraculous, midwives accused of witchcraft or criminal conspiracy, and everyday women whose pregnancies threatened their livelihoods—and their lives.

Pushback is essential reading for understanding the complex history of abortion and making sense of recent crackdowns on reproductive rights.]]> 288 Mary Fissell 1541604075 Caroline 4 women-s-history 4.43 Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion
author: Mary Fissell
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.43
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: women-s-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America]]> 846804 288 Jeff Wiltse 080783100X Caroline 0 to-read 3.93 2007 Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America
author: Jeff Wiltse
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/21
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]]> <![CDATA[Queer as Folklore: The Hidden Queer History of Myths and Monsters]]> 204190332 Queer as Folklore takes readers across centuries and continents which reveals the unsung heroes and villains of storytelling, magic and fantasy. Featuring images from archives, galleries and museums around the world, each chapter investigates the queer history of different mythic and folkloric characters, both old and new.

Leaving no headstone unturned, Sacha Coward will take you on a wild ride through the night from ancient Greece to the main stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race, visiting cross-dressing pirates, radical fairies and the graves of the ‘queerly departed� along the way. Queer communities have often sought refuge in the shadows, found kinship in the in-between and created safe spaces in underworlds; but these forgotten narratives tell stories of remarkable resilience that deserve to be heard.

Join any Pride march and you are likely to see a glorious display of papier-mâché unicorn heads trailing sequins, drag queens wearing mermaid tails and more fairy wings than you can shake a trident at. But these are not just accessories: they are queer symbols with historic roots.

To truly understand who queer people are today, we must confront the twisted tales of the past and Queer as Folklore is a celebration of queer history like you've never seen it before.]]> 352 Sacha Coward 1800183364 Caroline 3 4.08 2024 Queer as Folklore: The Hidden Queer History of Myths and Monsters
author: Sacha Coward
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2025/03/20
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]]> <![CDATA[The White Storm: How Racism Poisoned American Democracy]]> 205898120 A piercing examination of America's struggle with racism and why this now threatens the survival of the nation's democracy

When the U.S. Capitol was stormed in 2021, it was an attack on the very idea of America as a pluralist democracy. It was also a reminder that the worst threat to the United States today doesn’t come from any foreign despot, but from domestic racism. In The White Storm, the journalist and author Martin Gelin looks back at two decades as a political correspondent and three centuries of American history to understand this moment of crisis. In the vein of Alexis de Tocqueville or Tony Judt, fellow Europeans who traveled America searching for answers to its political contradictions, this is a journey across time and space, from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello to the slave plantations of Louisiana, from mass prisons in rural Arizona to memorials for lynching victims in Alabama.

The book reveals how every step forward for Black Americans is met with a fierce backlash from white Americans, taking two recurring violent extremism and a flight from the commons. The white backlash always grows in proportion to the black advances. After Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, a Black man at a polling station in Detroit "We used to pick cotton, now we pick presidents." It is precisely this Black agency that white nationalists refuse to accept.

The White Storm reveals how racism has permeated almost every significant conflict in America’s past. Now it threatens American democracy itself.]]> 400 Martin Gelin 1493086359 Caroline 5 american-history, politics 4.77 The White Storm: How Racism Poisoned American Democracy
author: Martin Gelin
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.77
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: american-history, politics
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]]> <![CDATA[Secret Servants of the Crown: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence]]> 213870706 Drawing on private and previously classified documents, this definitive history of women's contributions to the intelligence services is the first authoritative account of the hidden female army of clerks, typists, telephonists, and secretaries who were the cornerstone of the British secret state across two world wars and beyond.

A must-read for fans of A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE by Sonia Purnell and THE SISTERHOOD by Liza Mundy.

To the undiscerning eye, they were secretaries, typists, personal assistants, and telephonists. But those innocuous job titles provided the perfect cover for what were in reality a range of complex technical, clerical, and occupational roles. Often overlooked and underestimated by outsiders, the women of British intelligence encoded, decoded, and translated enemy messages, wrote propaganda, and oversaw agents, performing duties as diverse as they were indispensable.

One of those women was Kathleen Pettigrew, super-secretary to three consecutive Chiefs of MI6, the secret foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, and widely regarded as the inspiration for author Ian Fleming’s Miss Moneypenny. Serving her county loyally for four decades, Kathleen amassed a formidable knowledge of people and events. From the surprise apprehension of World War I courtesan spy Mata Hari to the unmasking of MI6 officer Kim Philby, the ‘Third Man� of the Cambridge spy ring, Kathleen created, organized, and archived an empire of top-secret information.

Though most women toiled in offices and backrooms, there were also agent-runners and agents, prized for their ability to hide in plain sight. Drawing on extensive research and unique access to family archives, Claire portrays many of these remarkable figures—including the brilliant, multi-lingual Lunn sisters, glamorous spy Olga Gray; and Jane Sissmore, MI5’s first female officer� and reconsiders the priceless contributions they made.

In a field where women were often assumed to be little more than window-dressing, Miss Moneypenny reveals their multi-faceted, essential roles, offering a powerful and compelling testament to their many accomplishments.]]> 352 Claire Hubbard-Hall 080654371X Caroline 3 3.85 2025 Secret Servants of the Crown: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence
author: Claire Hubbard-Hall
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: british-history, women-s-history, world-war-1, world-war-2
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]]> <![CDATA[In Search of Amrit Kaur: A Lost Princess and Her Vanished World]]> 58772730 As she builds her own life anew, an Italian journalist embarks on an all-consuming search for the true story of the mysterious princess H. H. Amrit Kaur of Mandi--her disappearance from India, her persecution by the Nazis, and her search for freedom at any cost.



On a sweltering day in 2007, having just lost her brother to illness, Livia Manera Sambuy finds herself standing before a 1924 photograph of a stunningly elegant Indian princess at a museum in Mumbai. What's written in the caption will change her life forever. This gorgeous Punjabi princess, it's said, sold her jewels in occupied Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp, where she died within a year.

Could it be true? And if so, how could such a sensational story have gone unnoticed? Instinctively, almost viscerally, Manera becomes entangled in the mystery, losing herself in the history of the British Raj, in the diamonds and sapphires of the twentieth-century aristocracy, in the Circus Balls and Jubilees, and in the lives of extraordinary figures such as the Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala, the Jewish banker Albert Kahn, and the Russian explorer Nicholas Roerich--all in a decades-long pursuit of the elusive Amrit Kaur.

When she rendezvouses with the princess's eighty-year-old daughter, Manera's search takes on a new dimension, as she strives to reconnect an orphan with the mother who abandoned her in 1933, leaving behind her two children, her raja husband, and a legacy of activism in India's women's civil rights movement.

In Search of Amrit Kaur is an engrossing detective story, a kaleidoscopic history lesson, and a moving portrait of women, across the century, seeking personal freedom.]]> 352 Livia Manera Sambuy 0374106010 Caroline 4 3.72 In Search of Amrit Kaur: A Lost Princess and Her Vanished World
author: Livia Manera Sambuy
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.72
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: biography, women-s-history, world-war-2
review:

]]> <![CDATA[History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900]]> 945829 Andrew Roberts 0297850768 Caroline 0 2.83 1956 History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900
author: Andrew Roberts
name: Caroline
average rating: 2.83
book published: 1956
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read, american-history, british-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Thou Savage Woman: The gripping new true crime history book of female killers in early modern Britain]]> 216455868 'Popular history at its best' Spectator

'Boisterous� replete with stabbings, bashing and thumping' Daily Mail

'A cocktail of brutal, tragic, and fascinating true crime from the era of the Tudors and Stuarts. This dark history at its best, narrated with empathy and precision' Gareth Russell

LADY KILLERS AND FEMME FATALES � STORIES OF MURDER MOST FOUL � HAVE GRIPPED PUBLIC IMAGINATION FOR CENTURIES

Early Modern Britain was awash with pamphlets, ballads, woodcuts broadcasting bloodthirsty tales of traitorous wives, greedy mistresses, cunning female poisoning lacing the supper with deadly substances; of child killers and spiteful witches, stories of women wholly and unnaturally wicked. These were printed or sung, tacked the walls of alehouses, sold in the streets for pennies and read voraciously to thrill all. But why? When the vast majority of murders then (and now) are committed by men.

In this bold, page-turning new history, former police officer and historian Blessin Adams tells stories of women whose violent crimes shattered the narrow confines of their gender � and whose notoriety revealed a society that was at once repulsed by and attracted to murderous female rebellion. Based on detailed research in court archives, each chapter explores murders that thrilled and terrified the British public; the crimes that caused the most concern and provoked the most debate. Women in this period killed rarely, and when they did it was usually within the context of extreme provocation or domestic violence. Adams has the ability of the best crime novelists in recreating the setting in which each case occurred as well as the motivations of each perpetrator.

Thou Savage Woman reminds us that women in the past had voices, that they sought to control their bodies and their environments and that they also had the capacity for committing acts of unspeakable violence.]]> 240 Blessin Adams 0008500193 Caroline 3 3.72 Thou Savage Woman: The gripping new true crime history book of female killers in early modern Britain
author: Blessin Adams
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.72
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: british-history, true-crime, women-s-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Northwomen: Untold Stories From the Other Half of the Viking World]]> 203613889
Until Scandinavia converted to Christianity and came under the rule of powerful kings, the Vikings were a dominant force in the medieval world. Outfitted with wind-powered sailing ships, they left their mark, spreading terror across Europe, sacking cities, deposing kings, and ransacking entire economies. After the Vikings, the world was never the same.

But as much as we know about this celebrated culture, there is a large missing piece: its women. All but ignored by contemporary European writers, these shadowy figures were thought to have played little part in the famous feats of the Vikings, instead remaining at home as wives, mothers, and homemakers.

In this cutting-edge, revisionist portrait, renowned science journalist Heather Pringle turns those assumptions on their head, using the latest archaeological research and historical findings to reveal this group as they actually were. Members of a complex society rich in culture, courage, and a surprisingly modern gender ideology, the women of the Viking age were in fact forces to be reckoned with, serving as:

Sorceresses
Warriors
Traders
Artisans
Explorers
Settlers
Landowners
Power brokers
Queens

Both ambitious and compelling, THE NORTHWOMEN is the true story of some of the most captivating figures of the Viking world—and what they reveal about the modern age.]]> 336 Heather Pringle 1426222025 Caroline 4 4.04 The Northwomen: Untold Stories From the Other Half of the Viking World
author: Heather Pringle
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: medieval-history, women-s-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread]]> 213243274 Explores the architecture of haunted houses, uncanny domestic spaces, and how the horror genre subverts and corrupts the sanctity of home.

The history of horror begins with a house. From Otranto to Amityville, the haunted house story endures because it perverts what is equally the most universal and the most personal of the home. Our home is an extension of our self, a manifestation of our identity, and a repository of our memories. It is a micro-universe of our own creation that we control. It is also where we are the most vulnerable because we are supposed to be the most safe.

Whether it is a decrepit Victorian mansion, a modernist luxury high-rise, a little cottage in the woods, or a starter house in the suburbs, Sick Houses explores how the horror genre in film, television, and literature uses architecture and the ideology of the home against us. It looks at the mythology of the American Dream and how the lure of homeownership becomes a trap. It celebrates the witch house, the power of the crone, and the fear of aging women who live alone. It explores how concrete utopias became ready-made mise en scene for urban terror.

From the betrayal of sentient shape-shifting houses to shadow-self dollhouse doppelgangers, Sick Houses examines how the horror genre subverts and corrupts that which is the most sacrosanct.]]> 232 Leila Taylor 1915672643 Caroline 3 3.87 2025 Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread
author: Leila Taylor
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families]]> 214152253 Drawing from an archive of nearly five thousand letters and advertisements, the riveting, dramatic story of formerly enslaved people who spent years searching for family members stolen away during slavery.

Of all the many horrors of slavery, the cruelest was the separation of families in slave auctions. Spouses and siblings were sold away from one other. Young children were separated from their mothers. Fathers were sent down river and never saw their families again.

As soon as slavery ended in 1865, family members began to search for one another, in some cases persisting until as late as the 1920s. They took out “information wanted� advertisements in newspapers and sent letters to the editor. Pastors in churches across the country read these advertisements from the pulpit, expanding the search to those who had never learned to read or who did not have access to newspapers. These documents demonstrate that even as most white Americans—and even some younger Black Americans, too—wanted to put slavery in the past, many former slaves, members of the “Freedom Generation,� continued for years, and even decades, to search for one another. These letters and advertisements are testaments to formerly enslaved people’s enduring love for the families they lost in slavery, yet they spent many years buried in the storage of local historical societies or on microfilm reels that time forgot.

Judith Giesberg draws on the archive that she founded—containing almost five thousand letters and advertisements placed by members of the Freedom Generation—to compile these stories in a narrative form for the first time. Her in-depth research turned up additional information about the writers, their families, and their enslavers. With this critical context, she recounts the moving stories of the people who placed the advertisements, the loved ones they tried to find, and the outcome of their quests to reunite.

This story underscores the cruelest horror of slavery—the forced breakup of families—and the resilience and determination of the formerly enslaved. Thoughtful, heart-wrenching, and illuminating, Last Seen finally gives this lesser-known aspect of slavery the attention it deserves.]]> 336 Judith Giesberg 1982174323 Caroline 4 4.11 Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families
author: Judith Giesberg
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.11
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: american-civil-war, american-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Parts]]> 212924194 The turbulent history of women’s bodies, from classical Greece to the modern day

Breasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb. Across history, these body parts have told women who they are and what they should do. Although knowledge of each part has changed through time, none of them tells a simple story. The way they work and in some cases even their existence have been debated. They can be seen as powerful or as disgusting, as relevant only to reproduction or as sources of sexual pleasure.

In Immaculate Forms, classicist and historian Helen King explores the symbiotic relationship between religion and medicine and their twinned history of gatekeeping over these key organs that have been used to define “woman,� illustrating how conceptions of women’s bodies have owed more to imagination and myth than to observation and science. Throughout history, the way we understand the body has always been debated, and it is still shaped by human intervention and read according to cultural interpretations.

Astute and engaging, Immaculate Forms is for everyone who has wondered what history has to say about today’s raging debates over the human body and who is “really� female.]]> 480 Helen King 1541606531 Caroline 4 women-s-history 3.96 Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Parts
author: Helen King
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.96
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: women-s-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century]]> 33917107
On November 9th, millions of Americans woke up to the impossible: the election of Donald Trump as president. Against all predictions, one of the most-disliked presidential candidates in history had swept the electoral college, elevating a man with open contempt for democratic norms and institutions to the height of power.

Timothy Snyder is one of the most celebrated historians of the Holocaust. In his books Bloodlands and Black Earth, he has carefully dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.�

Twenty Lessons is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.]]> 127 Timothy Snyder 0804190119 Caroline 4 american-history, politics 4.24 2017 On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
author: Timothy Snyder
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/06
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: american-history, politics
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tangled Fortunes: The Hidden History of Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South]]> 212924101 336 Kathryn Schumaker 1541605314 Caroline 3 american-history 3.62 2025 Tangled Fortunes: The Hidden History of Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South
author: Kathryn Schumaker
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: american-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History]]> 59568627
Ultimately, he delves into the darkness to explain how and why these people were capable of committing the worst crime in the history of the world. Rees traces the rise and eventual fall of the Nazis through the lens of ‘twelve warnings� � from talk about ‘them� and ‘us� to the escalation of racism � whilst also highlighting signs to look out for in present day leaders.

Rees uses previously unpublished testimony from former Nazis and those who grew up in the Nazi system, and in-depth psychological insights including cutting edge work on obedience, authority and the brain. THE NAZI MIND is a revelatory new way of understanding how so many people committed the most appalling crime of the 20th century.]]> 464 Laurence Rees 1541702336 Caroline 4 world-war-2 4.23 The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History
author: Laurence Rees
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.23
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: world-war-2
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin]]> 7624086 397 Hampton Sides 0385523920 Caroline 5 american-history
Sides begins with Ray's escape from Jefferson City Prison in 1967 and follows him across the United States to Mexico and back again. Each chapter alternates between King and Ray, and he gives an excellent look at the late days of the civil rights movement, of what forces led King to Memphis on that fateful day. It also explores the FBI of J.Edgar Hoover and the immense dragnet that was set up to track down and apprehend the assassin. It's fascinating to see how the smallest of details serve to make up the jigsaw puzzle that in the end identified Ray. Such a massive manhunt, it in all likelihood was, as Sides writes, the FBI's finest hour.

This is an immensely readable book, fast-paced, thrilling and heart-rending in many places. Sides really manages to make both men come alive again in these pages. You never really know what impelled Ray to murder King; he lied to the end of his days, and he remains an utterly inscrutable figure. But Sides makes King thoroughly human - a tired, flawed man possessed of a great vision for his people and his country.]]> 4.29 2010 Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin
author: Hampton Sides
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: american-history
review:
I've never really known very much about the Martin Luther King assassination. I wouldn't have even been able to name his killer. I literally knew nothing about the manhunt for James Earl Ray after he shot King in Memphis in 1968. But I could not put this book down, not for a minute.

Sides begins with Ray's escape from Jefferson City Prison in 1967 and follows him across the United States to Mexico and back again. Each chapter alternates between King and Ray, and he gives an excellent look at the late days of the civil rights movement, of what forces led King to Memphis on that fateful day. It also explores the FBI of J.Edgar Hoover and the immense dragnet that was set up to track down and apprehend the assassin. It's fascinating to see how the smallest of details serve to make up the jigsaw puzzle that in the end identified Ray. Such a massive manhunt, it in all likelihood was, as Sides writes, the FBI's finest hour.

This is an immensely readable book, fast-paced, thrilling and heart-rending in many places. Sides really manages to make both men come alive again in these pages. You never really know what impelled Ray to murder King; he lied to the end of his days, and he remains an utterly inscrutable figure. But Sides makes King thoroughly human - a tired, flawed man possessed of a great vision for his people and his country.
]]> <![CDATA[The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson: A Battle for Racial Justice at the Dawn of the Civil Rights Era]]> 56969546
Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR . . . SO FAR by The New Yorker

The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson is the true story of the wrongfully accused Black sharecropper and the Georgia prosecution desperate to pin the crime on him despite scant evidence. His first trial lasted only a day and featured a lackluster public defense. The book also tells the story of Homer Chase, a former World War II paratrooper and New England radical who was sent to the South by the Communist Party to recruit African Americans to the cause while offering them a chance at increased freedom. And it’s the story of Thurgood Marshall’s NAACP and their battle against not only entrenched racism but a Communist Party—despite facing nearly as much prejudice as those they were trying to help—intent on winning the hearts and minds of Black voters. The bitter battle between the two groups played out as the sides sparred over who would take the lead on Henderson’s defense, a period in which he spent years in prison away from a daughter he had never seen.

Through it all, The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson is a portrait of a community and a country at a crossroads, trying to choose between the path it knows is right and the path of least resistance. The case pitted powerful forces—often those steering legal and journalistic institutions—attempting to use racism and Red-Scare tactics against a populace that by and large believed the case against Henderson was suspect at best. But ultimately, it’s a hopeful story about how even when things look dark, some small measure of justice can be achieved against all the odds, and actual progress is possible. It’s the rare book that is a timely read, yet still manages to shed an informative light on America’s past and future, as well as its present.]]> 352 Chris Joyner 1419756362 Caroline 3 american-history, true-crime 3.85 The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson: A Battle for Racial Justice at the Dawn of the Civil Rights Era
author: Chris Joyner
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.85
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: american-history, true-crime
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Kennedy and King: The President, the Pastor, and the Battle over Civil Rights]]> 31932825 Kennedy and King traces the emergence of two of the twentieth century's greatest leaders, their powerful impact on each other and on the shape of the civil rights battle between 1960 and 1963. These two men from starkly different worlds profoundly influenced each other's personal development. Kennedy's hesitation on civil rights spurred King to greater acts of courage, and King inspired Kennedy to finally make a moral commitment to equality. As America still grapples with the legacy of slavery and the persistence of discrimination, Kennedy and King is a vital, vivid contribution to the literature of the Civil Rights Movement.]]> 352 Steven Levingston 0316267376 Caroline 4 american-history 4.45 2017 Kennedy and King: The President, the Pastor, and the Battle over Civil Rights
author: Steven Levingston
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: american-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary]]> 156521
From the bestselling author of Eyes on the Prize, here is the definitive biography of the great lawyer and Supreme Court justice.]]> 512 Juan Williams 0812932994 Caroline 4 american-history, biography
Thurgood Marshall was involved in almost all of the major civil rights cases of the era, most visibly Brown v. Board of Education, that paved the way for the integration of schools. He represented African-Americans against trumped-up murder charges, assault and rape charges; investigated charges of racism in the armed forces in Korea and Japan; won cases ending segregation on interstate buses, in colleges and universities, in housing contracts and primary elections; made the first challenge against the 'separate but equal' doctrine. After his career in the NAACP he later appointed the first African-American Solicitor General by JFK, and later the first African-American Justice of the Supreme Court.

Thurgood Marshall was arguably one of the most important figures in the Civil Rights Movement; many would argue, and I'm inclined to agree after reading this, that his role was as important, if not more so, as that of Martin Luther King Jr. Whilst King may have lent the movement its Messianic figurehead, Marshall was the one who arguably led the vanguard of change, believing as he did that change in minds and attitudes would necessarily follow changes in law.]]> 4.19 1998 Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary
author: Juan Williams
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/16
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: american-history, biography
review:
I have to confess, to my shame, that I never really knew who Thurgood Marshall was until I read Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America earlier in the year, in which he represented the 'Groveland Boys'. I found the glimpse of his role as chief lawyer for the NAACP in some of the most important civil rights cases fascinating, so when I came across this book I snapped it up to read. Having done so, I would say it is a must-read for anyone remotely interested in the Civil Rights Movement in America.

Thurgood Marshall was involved in almost all of the major civil rights cases of the era, most visibly Brown v. Board of Education, that paved the way for the integration of schools. He represented African-Americans against trumped-up murder charges, assault and rape charges; investigated charges of racism in the armed forces in Korea and Japan; won cases ending segregation on interstate buses, in colleges and universities, in housing contracts and primary elections; made the first challenge against the 'separate but equal' doctrine. After his career in the NAACP he later appointed the first African-American Solicitor General by JFK, and later the first African-American Justice of the Supreme Court.

Thurgood Marshall was arguably one of the most important figures in the Civil Rights Movement; many would argue, and I'm inclined to agree after reading this, that his role was as important, if not more so, as that of Martin Luther King Jr. Whilst King may have lent the movement its Messianic figurehead, Marshall was the one who arguably led the vanguard of change, believing as he did that change in minds and attitudes would necessarily follow changes in law.
]]> <![CDATA[There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the People Who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou (Yale ... Series in Legal History and Reference)]]> 222797034 A sweeping study of sexual assault trials in the Jim Crow South, detailing the racial and economic inequities of rape law and the resistance of ordinary women

In the early years of the twentieth century, Mississippi County, Arkansas, was a brutal and profitable place. Home to starving, landless farmers, the county produced almost 2 percent of the entire world’s cotton. It was also the site of two rape trials that made national an accusation that sent two Black men, almost certainly innocent, to death row; and the case of two white men, almost certainly guilty, who were likewise sentenced to death but who would ultimately face a very different fate. Braiding together these stories, Scott W. Stern examines how the Jim Crow legal system relied on selectively prosecuting rape to uphold the racial, gender, and economic hierarchies of the segregated, unequal South. But as much as rape law was a site of oppression, it was also, Stern shows, an arena of fierce resistance.

Based on deep archival research, this kaleidoscopic narrative includes new information about the early career of Thurgood Marshall, who called one of the Mississippi County trials “worse than any we have had as yet,� and the anti-rape activism of Maya Angelou, who came of age in Arkansas and whose decision to write about her own sexual assault helped shape a burgeoning movement.]]> 462 Scott W. Stern 0300281587 Caroline 3 4.25 There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the People Who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou (Yale ... Series in Legal History and Reference)
author: Scott W. Stern
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: american-history, women-s-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman's Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue]]> 203956642 From the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE, a re-examination of one of the 20th century’s greatest unsung power players When Pamela Churchill Harriman died in 1997, obituaries that followed were predictably sexist. Written off as a party girl, courtesan and social climber, her real legacy was overshadowed by a glamorous social life spent in glittering, elite circles of power. That is, until with a wealth of new research, interviews and newly discovered sources, Sonia Purnell is reclaiming her larger-than-life story of influence and power in full, spectacular depth for the first time. At age 20 Churchill’s beloved daughter-in-law became a “secret weapon� during World War II, wining, dining, and seducing diplomats and envoys to help win over American sentiment (and secrets) for the cause. She transformed Gianni Agnelli into a savvy businessman and heir to the Fiat empire, and after moving to the US brought a struggling Democratic party back to life, hand-picking Bill Clinton from obscurity and vaulting him to the presidency. Picked as Ambassador to France, she deployed her legendary quiet, subtle power to charm world leaders and broker an end to the conflict in Bosnia, in effect rehabilitating the reputation of the US on the world stage. There are few people in history with a greater scope of impact over as many decades and across continents, and there is no one in 20th Century politics, culture, and fashion whom she did not know, including Aly Khan, Kay Graham, Jackie Onassis, Truman Capote, Gloria Steinem, Ed Murrow, and Frank Sinatra among her friends and lovers.Written with the novelistic richness and investigative rigor that only Sonia Purnell could bring to this story full of sex, politics, yachts, and fabulous clothes, KINGMAKER re-asserts Harriman’s rightful place in history.]]> 528 Sonia Purnell 0593297806 Caroline 5 4.10 Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman's Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue
author: Sonia Purnell
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/08
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: american-history, biography, british-history, women-s-history, world-war-2
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon]]> 28495892
History remembers Robert F. Kennedy as a racial healer, a tribune for the poor, and the last progressive knight. But Kennedy—nurtured on the rightist orthodoxies of his dynasty-building father—started his public life as counsel to the left-baiting, table-thumping Senator Joseph McCarthy.

A bare-knuckled political operative who masterminded his brother’s whatever-it-takes bids for senator and president, Kennedy okayed FBI wiretaps of Martin Luther King Jr. and cloak-and-dagger operations against communist Cuba that included blowing up railroad bridges, sabotaging crops, and plotting the elimination of President Fidel Castro.

Remembered now as a rare optimist in an age of political cynicism, RFK’s profoundly moving journey from cold warrior to hot-blooded liberal also offers a lens into two of the most chaotic and confounding decades of twentieth century America.]]> 608 Larry Tye 0812993349 Caroline 5
And yet when he was murdered in 1968, Bobby Kennedy was a liberal dream, a man who reached out to marginalised groups - the poor, the destitute, the unemployed, African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican-Americans - a man who was not just admired and respected but genuinely loved; a man who was seen as a bridge between black and white, rich and poor; a man who despite coming from wealth and privilege managed to empathise and understand the concerns of average Americans; a man who wore his heart on his sleeve and openly cared about people. His campaign embodied all of these aspects, and it touched the hearts of Americans in a way that perhaps no presidential candidate has since.

So how did he get there? How did Bobby go from hawk to dove, ruthless to tender-hearted, aloof to open and warm? As Larry Tye chronicles in this insightful and genuine biography, those aspects were always there in Bobby. Throughout his life, those who knew him joked about Good Bobby and Bad Bobby, the twin sides to his character, as though he were some kind of split personality. But as Tye writes, it seems more like Bobby was a genuinely multi-faceted conflicted man, a man who tended to react initially one way before giving himself time to reflect and respond in a more thoughtful, layered and enlightened manner. It is a pattern that repeats again and again in Bobby's life - that kneejerk conservatism tempered by his own self-doubt and willingness to step back and examine a situation before proceeding. It was more pronounced in his youth, but as Bobby grew and matured the more appealing aspects of his character took prominence - his compassion, his generosity, his concern for the underprivileged, his love for children, his playfulness, his ability to reach out and touch hearts and minds, to give. It's ironic in many ways that when they were both alive Jack was seen as the warm, charismatic brother and Bobby the ruthless self-interested politician, when in many ways the opposite was true. Jack was never prone to the kind of self-doubt that Bobby was, and Jack's eye was always on the prize of the White House, the issues mattering far less to him. Bobby's run at the White House was always about the journey, the issues and the people, and he had the capacity to be tested, criticised and found wanting with a grace that Jack never exhibited.

At one point in this book Larry Tye discusses how the most insightful critics of any presidential candidate are the political reporters, hard-bitten and cynical, who have seen candidates come and go, see them saying one thing to one group of people in one part of the country and something contradictory somewhere else to another group. These reporters viewed Bobby with that same sceptical, mistrustful eye, and yet in the course of his last campaign he won them over, won not just their acceptance or respect but their love. People loved Bobby; it showed at the time, and it shows in this book. Larry Tye may have set out to write an impartial appraisal of Bobby Kennedy's political evolution, but by the end it reads like a love song. Even after his death, it's hard to resist the appeal of a man like Bobby Kennedy.

Now if you'll excuse me I'll just be over here crying for what might have been...]]> 4.38 2016 Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon
author: Larry Tye
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/05
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: american-history, biography, kennedy-family
review:
In an era when 'flipflopping' is a charge frequently hurled at candidates (as though the ability to be open-minded and flexible in response to changing facts and situations is a bad thing), Bobby Kennedy was perhaps the ultimate 'flipflopper'. The Bobby Kennedy of the 1950s was a staunch conservative, a supporter of Joe McCarthy, an unscrupulous political campaign manager and a ruthless hatchet-man for his brother Jack. The Bobby Kennedy of the early 60s was the nation's top law enforcement officer and a hawk in the Cold War against communism, authorising wiretaps on Martin Luther King, assassination attempts on Fidel Castro and seriously debating an invasion of Cuba.

And yet when he was murdered in 1968, Bobby Kennedy was a liberal dream, a man who reached out to marginalised groups - the poor, the destitute, the unemployed, African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican-Americans - a man who was not just admired and respected but genuinely loved; a man who was seen as a bridge between black and white, rich and poor; a man who despite coming from wealth and privilege managed to empathise and understand the concerns of average Americans; a man who wore his heart on his sleeve and openly cared about people. His campaign embodied all of these aspects, and it touched the hearts of Americans in a way that perhaps no presidential candidate has since.

So how did he get there? How did Bobby go from hawk to dove, ruthless to tender-hearted, aloof to open and warm? As Larry Tye chronicles in this insightful and genuine biography, those aspects were always there in Bobby. Throughout his life, those who knew him joked about Good Bobby and Bad Bobby, the twin sides to his character, as though he were some kind of split personality. But as Tye writes, it seems more like Bobby was a genuinely multi-faceted conflicted man, a man who tended to react initially one way before giving himself time to reflect and respond in a more thoughtful, layered and enlightened manner. It is a pattern that repeats again and again in Bobby's life - that kneejerk conservatism tempered by his own self-doubt and willingness to step back and examine a situation before proceeding. It was more pronounced in his youth, but as Bobby grew and matured the more appealing aspects of his character took prominence - his compassion, his generosity, his concern for the underprivileged, his love for children, his playfulness, his ability to reach out and touch hearts and minds, to give. It's ironic in many ways that when they were both alive Jack was seen as the warm, charismatic brother and Bobby the ruthless self-interested politician, when in many ways the opposite was true. Jack was never prone to the kind of self-doubt that Bobby was, and Jack's eye was always on the prize of the White House, the issues mattering far less to him. Bobby's run at the White House was always about the journey, the issues and the people, and he had the capacity to be tested, criticised and found wanting with a grace that Jack never exhibited.

At one point in this book Larry Tye discusses how the most insightful critics of any presidential candidate are the political reporters, hard-bitten and cynical, who have seen candidates come and go, see them saying one thing to one group of people in one part of the country and something contradictory somewhere else to another group. These reporters viewed Bobby with that same sceptical, mistrustful eye, and yet in the course of his last campaign he won them over, won not just their acceptance or respect but their love. People loved Bobby; it showed at the time, and it shows in this book. Larry Tye may have set out to write an impartial appraisal of Bobby Kennedy's political evolution, but by the end it reads like a love song. Even after his death, it's hard to resist the appeal of a man like Bobby Kennedy.

Now if you'll excuse me I'll just be over here crying for what might have been...
]]> <![CDATA[On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives]]> 51579317 A captivating book about the emotional and literary power of the lives we might have lived had our chances or choices been different.

We each live one life, formed by paths taken and untaken. Choosing a job, getting married, deciding on a place to live or whether to have children--every decision precludes another. But what if you'd gone the other way? It can be a seductive thought, even a haunting one.

Andrew H. Miller illuminates this theme of modern culture: the allure of the alternate self. From Robert Frost to Sharon Olds, Virginia Woolf to Ian McEwan, Jane Hirshfield to Carl Dennis, storytellers of every stripe write of the lives we didn't have. What forces encourage us to think this way about ourselves, and to identify with fictional and poetic voices speaking from the shadows of what might have been? Not only poets and novelists, but psychologists and philosophers have much to say on this question. Miller finds wisdom in all these sources, revealing the beauty, the power, and the struggle of our unled lives.

In an elegant and provocative rumination, he lingers with other selves, listening to what they say. Peering down the path not taken can be frightening, but it has its rewards. On Not Being Someone Else offers the balm that when we confront our imaginary selves, we discover who we are.]]> 192 Andrew H. Miller 0674238087 Caroline 4 3.48 On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives
author: Andrew H. Miller
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.48
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves]]> 39105401
Bering survived. And in addition to relief, the fading of his suicidal thoughts brought curiosity. Where had they come from? Would they return? Is the suicidal impulse found in other animals? Or is our vulnerability to suicide a uniquely human evolutionary development? In Suicidal, Bering answers all these questions and more, taking us through the science and psychology of suicide, revealing its cognitive secrets and the subtle tricks our minds play on us when we’re easy emotional prey. Scientific studies, personal stories, and remarkable cross-species comparisons come together to help readers critically analyze their own doomsday thoughts while gaining broad insight into a problem that, tragically, will most likely touch all of us at some point in our lives. But while the subject is certainly a heavy one, Bering’s touch is light. Having been through this himself, he knows that sometimes the most effective response to our darkest moments is a gentle humor, one that, while not denying the seriousness of suffering, at the same time acknowledges our complicated, flawed, and yet precious existence.

Authoritative, accessible, personal, profound—there’s never been a book on suicide like this. It will help you understand yourself and your loved ones, and it will change the way you think about this most vexing of human problems.]]> 275 Jesse Bering 022646332X Caroline 4 popular-science 3.86 2018 Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves
author: Jesse Bering
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: popular-science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Indentured Servitude: Unfree Labour and Citizenship in the British Colonies (Volume 4) (States, People, and the History of Social Change)]]> 55829080 288 Anna Suranyi 0228006678 Caroline 3 3.25 Indentured Servitude: Unfree Labour and Citizenship in the British Colonies (Volume 4) (States, People, and the History of Social Change)
author: Anna Suranyi
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.25
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/23
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Past Is Never Dead: The Trial of James Ford Seale and Mississippi's Struggle for Redemption]]> 6373382 290 Harry N. MacLean 0465005047 Caroline 3 american-history 3.61 2009 The Past Is Never Dead: The Trial of James Ford Seale and Mississippi's Struggle for Redemption
author: Harry N. MacLean
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: american-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900�1939]]> 199456827
For the American women who made Paris their home during the early decades of the twentieth century, the city offered unique opportunities for personal emancipation and professional innovation. While living as expatriates in the international center of all things avant-garde, these women escaped the constraints that limited them at home and enjoyed unprecedented freedom and autonomy. Through portraiture, this volume illuminates the histories of sixty convention-defying women who contributed to the vibrant modernist milieu of Paris—including Berenice Abbott, Josephine Baker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Peggy Guggenheim, Romaine Brooks, and Gertrude Stein. Several of them rose to preeminence as cultural arbiters while exploring culture-shifting experiments in fields such as art, literature, publishing, music, fashion, journalism, theater, and dance.

Beautifully illustrated, Brilliant Exiles features essays that trace the divergent trajectories of American women in Paris, examining the impact of race, class, and sexuality on their experiences in the French capital. The texts also highlight the role of portraiture in articulating new conceptions of female identity that American women were at liberty to develop in Paris. Working collaboratively with their portraitists, they honed the images that would memorialize them and redefine the imagery of modern womanhood.

Published in association with the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

Exhibition

National Portrait Gallery
(April 26, 2024–February 23, 2025)

Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY
(March 29–June 22, 2025)

Georgia Museum of Art
(July 19–October 12, 2025)]]> 288 Robyn Asleson 0300273584 Caroline 0 to-read 4.00 Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939
author: Robyn Asleson
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy]]> 32149626 How interracial love and marriage changed history, and may soon alter the landscape of American politics.

Loving beyond boundaries is a radical act that is changing America. When Mildred and Richard Loving wed in 1958, they were ripped from their shared bed and taken to court. Their crime: miscegenation, punished by exile from their home state of Virginia. The resulting landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia ended bans on interracial marriage and remains a signature case--the first to use the words "white supremacy" to describe such racism.

Drawing from the earliest chapters in US history, legal scholar Sheryll Cashin reveals the enduring legacy of America's original sin, tracing how we transformed from a country without an entrenched construction of race to a nation where one drop of nonwhite blood merited exclusion from full citizenship. In vivid detail, she illustrates how the idea of whiteness was created by the planter class of yesterday and is reinforced by today's power-hungry dog-whistlers to divide struggling whites and people of color, ensuring plutocracy and undermining the common good.

Cashin argues that over the course of the last four centuries there have been "ardent integrators" and that those people are today contributing to the emergence of a class of "culturally dexterous" Americans. In the fifty years since the Lovings won their case, approval for interracial marriage rose from 4 percent to 87 percent. Cashin speculates that rising rates of interracial intimacy--including cross-racial adoption, romance, and friendship--combined with immigration, demographic, and generational change, will create an ascendant coalition of culturally dexterous whites and people of color.

Loving is both a history of white supremacy and a hopeful treatise on the future of race relations in America, challenging the notion that trickle-down progressive politics is our only hope for a more inclusive society. Accessible and sharp, Cashin reanimates the possibility of a future where interracial understanding serves as a catalyst of a social revolution ending not in artificial color blindness but in a culture where acceptance and difference are celebrated.]]> 232 Sheryll Cashin 0807058270 Caroline 3 american-history 4.13 2017 Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy
author: Sheryll Cashin
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/18
date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: american-history
review:

]]> Mark Twain 219158874 Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain

Ron Chernow, the highly lauded biographer of Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and Ulysses S. Grant, brings his considerable powers to bear on America’s first, and most influential, literary celebrity, Mark Twain. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, under Halley’s Comet, the rambunctious Twain was an early teller of tall tales. He left his home in Missouri at an early age, piloted steamboats on the Mississippi, and arrived in the Nevada Territory during the silver-mining boom. Before long, he had accepted a job at the local newspaper, where he barged into vigorous discourse and debate, hoaxes and hijinks. After moving to San Francisco, he published stories that attracted national attention for their brashness and humor, writing under a pen name soon to be immortalized.

Chernow draws a richly nuanced portrait of the man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune and crafted his celebrity persona with meticulous care. Twain eventually settled with his wife and three daughters in Hartford, where he wrote some of his most well-known works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, earning him further acclaim. He threw himself into American politics, emerging as the nation’s most notable pundit. While his talents as a writer and speaker flourished, his madcap business ventures eventually forced him into bankruptcy; to economize, Twain and his family spent nine eventful years in exile in Europe. He suffered the death of his wife and two daughters, and the last stage of his life was marked by heartache, political crusades, and eccentric behavior that sometimes obscured darker forces at play.

Drawing on Twain’s bountiful archives, including his fifty notebooks, thousands of letters, and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow masterfully captures a man whose career reflected the country’s westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars. No other white author of his generation grappled so fully with the legacy of slavery after the Civil War or showed such keen interest in African American culture. Today, more than one hundred years after his death, Twain’s writing continues to be read, debated, and quoted. In this brilliant work of scholarship, a moving tribute to the writer’s talent and humanity, Chernow reveals the magnificent and often maddening life of one of the most original characters in American history.]]> 1200 Ron Chernow 0525561722 Caroline 0 to-read 4.06 2025 Mark Twain
author: Ron Chernow
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi]]> 36902444
In Delta Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi , Ellen B. Meacham tells the story of Kennedy's visit to the Delta, while also examining the forces of history, economics, and politics that shaped the lives of the children he met in Mississippi in 1967 and the decades that followed. The book includes thirty-seven powerful photographs, a dozen published here for the first time. Kennedy's visit to the Mississippi Delta as part of a Senate subcommittee investigation of poverty programs lasted only a few hours, but Kennedy, the people he encountered, Mississippi, and the nation felt the impact of that journey for much longer. His visit and its aftermath crystallized many of the domestic issues that later moved Kennedy toward his candidacy for the presidency. Upon his return to Washington, Kennedy immediately began seeking ways to help the children he met on his visit; however, his efforts were frustrated by institutional obstacles and blocked by powerful men who were indifferent and, at times, hostile to the plight of poor black children.

Sadly, we know what happened to Kennedy, but this book also introduces us to three of the children he met on his visit, including the baby on the floor, and finishes their stories. Kennedy talked about what he had seen in Mississippi for the remaining fourteen months of his life. His vision for America was shaped by the plight of the hungry children he encountered there.]]> 304 Ellen B. Meacham 1496817451 Caroline 4 4.43 Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi
author: Ellen B. Meacham
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.43
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/14
date added: 2024/12/14
shelves: american-history, kennedy-family
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Rising Tide: the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America]]> 49376 Rising Tide is the story of this forgotten event, the greatest natural disaster this country has ever known. But it is not simply a tale of disaster. The flood transformed part of the nation and had a major cultural and political impact on the rest.

Rising Tide is an American epic about science, race, honor, politics, and society. Rising Tide begins in the nineteenth century, when the first serious attempts to control the river began. The story focuses on engineers James Eads and Andrew Humphreys, who hated each other. Out of the collision of their personalities and their theories came a compromise river policy that would lead to the disaster of the 1927 flood yet would also allow the cultivation of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta and create wealth and aristocracy, as well as a whole culture. In the end, the flood had indeed changed the face of America, leading to the most comprehensive legislation the government had ever enacted, touching the entire Mississippi valley from Pennsylvania to Montana. In its aftermath was laid the foundation for the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt.]]> 524 John M. Barry 0684840022 Caroline 0 to-read 4.21 1997 Rising Tide: the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America
author: John M. Barry
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham]]> 209801576 From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, an extraordinary story of the meteoric rise and fall of King James I’s favorite, George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham.

As the king’s lover, Buckingham was one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic seventeenth-century Englishmen at the heart of royal and political life. A dazzling figure on horseback and a skillful player of the political game, he rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth and power. By the time he was thirty-three he had been first minister to two successive kings.

With a novelist’s touch, Lucy Hughes-Hallett transports us into a courtly world of masques and dancing, exquisite clothes, the art of Rubens and Van Dyck, gender-fluidity, sex, and appallingly rudimentary medicine. These were dangerous and complicated times, an era where witch hunts coexisted with Descartian rationality, and Buckingham stood at its center--until his spectacular fall from grace.

From tempestuous scenes in Parliament to the political force of public opinion, The Scapegoatis a rich and compelling story with deep resonance for today’s world. Hughes-Hallett’s extraordinary recreation of the period delves into love, war, and pacifism in a society on the brink of cataclysmic change.]]> 688 Lucy Hughes-Hallett 0062940139 Caroline 4 english-history 4.29 2024 The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham
author: Lucy Hughes-Hallett
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/09
date added: 2024/12/09
shelves: english-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi]]> 204316858 A shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till that lays bare how forces from around the world converged on the Mississippi Delta in the long lead-up to the crime, and how the truth was erased for so long. Wright Thompson’s family farm in Mississippi is 23 miles from the site of one of the most notorious and consequential killings in American history, yet he had to leave the state for college before he learned the first thing about it. To this day, fundamental truths about the crime are widely unknown, including where it took place and how many people were involved. This is no the cover-up began at once, and it is ongoing.In August 1955, two men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were charged with the torture and murder of the 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi.After their inevitable acquittal in a mockery of justice, they gave a false confession to a journalist, which was misleading about where the long night of hell took place and who was involved.In fact, Wright Thompson reveals, at least nine people can be placed at the scene, which was inside the barn of one of the killers, on a plot of land within the six-square-mile grid whose official name is Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, fabled in the Delta of myth as the birthplace of the blues on nearby Dockery Plantation. Even in the context of the brutal caste regime of the time, the four-hour torture and murder of a boy barely in his teens for whistling at a young white woman was acutely depraved; Till’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to keep the casket open seared the crime indelibly into American consciousness. Wright Thompson has a deep understanding of this story—the world of the families of both Emmett Till and his killers, and all the forces that aligned to place them together on that spot on the map.As he shows, the full horror of the crime was its inevitability, and how much about it we still need to understand. Ultimately this is a story about property, and money, and power.It implicates all of us.In The Barn, Thompson befriends the few people who have been engaged in the hard, fearful business of bringing the truth to light, people like Wheeler Parker, Emmett Till’s friend, who came down from Chicago with him that summer, and is the last person alive to know him well.Wheeler Parker’s journey to put the killing floor of the barn on the map of Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, and the Delta, and America, is a journey we all need to go on if this country is to heal from its oldest, deepest wound.]]> 448 Wright Thompson 0593299825 Caroline 5 american-history, true-crime 4.38 2024 The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi
author: Wright Thompson
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: american-history, true-crime
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Reckoning with Race: America's Failure]]> 32073012
Importantly, the evergreen topics of identity, assimilation, and separation come to the fore in a balanced, uncompromising, and unflinching narrative. People, cities, and regions are profiled. Despite civil rights legislation, the racial divide between the races remains a chasm. A plethora of reports, commissions, conferences, and other highly visible gestures, purporting to do something have generated publicity, but little else. There remain no adequate structures—family, community or church—to provide leadership. Destructive cultural traits cannot be explained solely by poverty.

The book asks and answers many questions. After emancipation, how were blacks historically segregated from the rest of American society? Why is self-segregation still a feature of black society? Why do large numbers of blacks resist assimilation and the acceptance of middle class norms of behavior? Why has there been so little black penetration in the private sector? Why did the removal of overt legal segregation and civil rights legislation in the 1960s not settle the racial conundrum? What are the differences and similarities between the leaders of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and today? Why do we still have the problems enumerated in the Kerner Commission report (1968) after trillions of dollars have been spent promote black progress? What, if anything, should be done, to eliminate the racial divide?]]> 352 Gene Dattel 1594039097 Caroline 0 to-read 5.00 Reckoning with Race: America's Failure
author: Gene Dattel
name: Caroline
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Empire of Cotton: A Global History]]> 20758057
Cotton is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet understanding its history is key to understanding the origins of modern capitalism. Sven Beckert’s rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world. Here is the story of how, beginning well before the advent of machine production in the 1780s, these men captured ancient trades and skills in Asia, and combined them with the expropriation of lands in the Americas and the enslavement of African workers to crucially reshape the disparate realms of cotton that had existed for millennia, and how industrial capitalism gave birth to an empire, and how this force transformed the world.

The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. The result is a book as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist.

]]> 640 Sven Beckert 0375414142 Caroline 0 to-read 3.88 2014 Empire of Cotton: A Global History
author: Sven Beckert
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Remembering Emmett Till 41591202
In Remembering Emmett Till , Dave Tell gives us five accounts of the commemoration of this infamous crime. In a development no one could have foreseen, Till’s murder—one of the darkest moments in the region’s history—has become an economic driver for the Delta. Historical tourism has transformed seemingly innocuous places like bridges, boat landings, gas stations, and riverbeds into sites of racial politics, reminders of the still-unsettled question of how best to remember the victim of this heinous crime. Tell builds an insightful and persuasive case for how these memorials have altered the Delta’s physical and cultural landscape, drawing potent connections between the dawn of the civil rights era and our own moment of renewed fire for racial justice.
]]> 312 Dave Tell 022655953X Caroline 0 to-read 3.81 Remembering Emmett Till
author: Dave Tell
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.81
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> PrairyErth (A Deep Map) 163868 Blue Highways "a masterpiece." Now Heat-Moon has pulled to the side of the road and set off on foot to take readers on an exploration of time and space, landscape and history in the Flint Hills of central Kansas.]]> 624 William Least Heat-Moon 039592569X Caroline 0 to-read 4.04 1991 PrairyErth (A Deep Map)
author: William Least Heat-Moon
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Providence 3147829 292 Will D. Campbell 1563520249 Caroline 0 to-read 4.18 1992 Providence
author: Will D. Campbell
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Power and the Glory: The Country House Before the Great War]]> 211124693
The Power and the Glory explores the country house during this golden age, when Britain ruled over a quarter of the world’s population, when its stately homes were at their most opulent and when, for the privileged few, life in the country house was the best life of all.]]> 420 Adrian Tinniswood 1529934524 Caroline 4 4.00 The Power and the Glory: The Country House Before the Great War
author: Adrian Tinniswood
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/27
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Under Cover of Darkness: Murders in Blackout London]]> 218215651 A gripping new history of London during the Blackout—revealing the violent crime that spread across the capital under the cover of darkness


Fear was the unacknowledged spectre haunting the streets of London during the Second World War; fear not only of death from the German bombers circling above, but of violence at the hands of fellow Londoners in the streets below. Mass displacement, the anonymity of shelters, and the bomb-scarred landscape offered unprecedented opportunities for violent crime.


In this absorbing, sometimes shocking account, Amy Helen Bell uncovers the hidden stories of murder and violence that were rife in wartime London. Bell moves through the city, examining the crimes in their various locations, from domestic violence in the home to robberies in the blacked-out streets and fights in pubs and clubs. She reveals the experiences of women, children, and the elderly, and focuses on the lives of the victims, as well as their deaths.


This groundbreaking study transforms our understanding of the ways in which war made people vulnerable—not just to the enemy, but to each other.]]> 328 Amy Helen Bell 030028022X Caroline 3 3.90 Under Cover of Darkness: Murders in Blackout London
author: Amy Helen Bell
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.90
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/23
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: british-history, true-crime, world-war-2
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Maid and the Queen: The Secret History of Joan of Arc]]> 11797366 “Attention, ‘Game of Thrones� fans: The most enjoyably sensational aspects of medieval politics�double-crosses, ambushes, bizarre personal obsessions, lunacy and naked self-interest�are in abundant evidence in Nancy Goldstone's The Maid and the Queen.� (Laura Miller, Salon.com)

Politically astute, ambitious, and beautiful, Yolande of Aragon, queen of Sicily, was one of the most powerful women of the Middle Ages. Caught in the complex dynastic battle of the Hundred Years War, Yolande championed the dauphin's cause against the forces of England and Burgundy, drawing on her savvy, her statecraft, and her intimate network of spies. But the enemy seemed invincible. Just as French hopes dimmed, an astonishingly courageous young woman named Joan of Arc arrived from the farthest recesses of the kingdom, claiming she carried a divine message-a message that would change the course of history and ultimately lead to the coronation of Charles VII and the triumph of France.

Now, on the six hundredth anniversary of the birth of Joan of Arc, this fascinating book explores the relationship between these two remarkable women, and deepens our understanding of this dramatic period in history. How did an illiterate peasant girl gain access to the future king of France, earn his trust, and ultimately lead his forces into battle? Was it only the hand of God that moved Joan of Arc-or was it also Yolande of Aragon?]]> 296 Nancy Goldstone 0670023337 Caroline 4 3.81 2011 The Maid and the Queen: The Secret History of Joan of Arc
author: Nancy Goldstone
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/23
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: english-history, french-history, medieval-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Haunted: Ghost Stories and Their Afterlives]]> 211166739 We all know the same it's simply a question of how doggedly they haunt us.


Part-chilling tale, part-memoir, part-cultural exploration, Ghost Stories and Their Afterlives takes us through some of the most chilling and enduring ghost stories, and discusses what they reveal about the listener, the teller and the times we live in.


Jay Gilbert has been collecting tales of the supernatural from her local area (a small village outside of Newcastle) for years and what surprised her most is how universal those not only in terms of recurring spectres that haunt us the world over (I'm looking at you, White Ladies), but also how similar our experience of ghost-telling is, wherever we grew up. The result is a book which explores more widely the ghosts of the British Isles and how they have endured and changed through the how they reflect the communities in which they originate, and how they are similar to and different from similar stories from across the world.


Haunted doesn't just thrill with the tales of the inexplicable, but also asks why are we so fascinated by ghost stories and what do they tell us about the community and people who cultivate them. Why are some tropes universal, while others are very much unique to the place they haunt? Do we actually care about the identity of the ghost? Or are we more concerned about how the alleged sighting made us feel?

Aimed at both believers and sceptics, it's not only for those who are looking to be frightened a little, but also for those interested in the psychology and history of the long tradition of supernatural storytelling.]]> 245 E. Jay Gilbert 1786582902 Caroline 4 3.98 Haunted: Ghost Stories and Their Afterlives
author: E. Jay Gilbert
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.98
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/20
date added: 2024/11/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era]]> 164545333
In Little Englanders, Alwyn Turner reconsiders the Edwardian era as a time of profound social change, with the rise of women's suffrage and the labour movement, unrest in Ireland and the Boer republics, scandals in parliament and culture wars at home. He tells the story of the Edwardians through music halls and male beauty contests, the real Peaky Blinders and the 1908 Summer Olympics. In this colourful, detailed and hugely entertaining social history, Turner shows that, though the golden Victorian age was in the past, the birth of modern Britain was only just beginning.]]> 399 Alwyn Turner 1800815328 Caroline 3 british-history 4.08 2024 Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era
author: Alwyn Turner
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/16
date added: 2024/11/16
shelves: british-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective]]> 210129411 A revelatory history of the women who brought Victorian criminals to account—and how they became a cultural sensation

From Wilkie Collins to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the traditional image of the Victorian detective is male. Few people realise that women detectives successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves.

Sara Lodge recovers these forgotten women’s lives. She also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction, enthralling a public who relished the spectacle of a cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroine who got the better of love rats, burglars, and murderers alike.

How did the morally ambiguous work of real women detectives, sometimes paid to betray their fellow women, compare with the exploits of their fictional counterparts, who always save the day? Lodge’s book takes us into the murky underworld of Victorian society on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the female detective as both an unacknowledged labourer and a feminist icon.]]> 384 Sara Lodge 0300277881 Caroline 3 3.84 2024 The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective
author: Sara Lodge
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/14
date added: 2024/11/14
shelves: british-history, victorian-history, women-s-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ghosts of the British Museum: A True Story of Colonial Loot and Restless Objects]]> 200483016
What if it presents us not with a carefully ordered cross section of history but is instead a palatial trophy cabinet of colonial loot swarming with volatile and errant spirits?

When artist and writer Noah Angell first heard murmurs of ghostly sightings at the British Museum he had to find out more. What started as a trickle soon became a landslide as staff old and new, from guards of formidable build to respected curators, brought forth testimonies of their inexplicable supernatural encounters.

It became clear that the source of the disturbances was related to the Museum's contents - unquiet objects, holy plunder, and restless human remains protesting their enforced stay within the colonial collection's cases, cabinets and deep underground vaults. Be it wraiths associated with genocides, uprooted sacred beings or the afterglow of deaths that occurred inside the museum itself, according to those who have worked there, the museum is heaving with profound spectral disorder.

Ghosts of the British Museum fuses storytelling, folklore and history, digs deep into our imperial past and unmasks the world's oldest national museum as a site of ongoing conflict, where under the guise of preservation, restless objects are held against their will.

It now appears that the objects are fighting back.]]> Noah Angell 1800961332 Caroline 3 british-history 3.51 Ghosts of the British Museum: A True Story of Colonial Loot and Restless Objects
author: Noah Angell
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.51
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/09
date added: 2024/11/09
shelves: british-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV]]> 77264775 From an acclaimed historian and author comes an epic the dual biography of Richard II and Henry IV, two cousins whose lives played out in extraordinary parallel, until Henry deposed the tyrant Richard and declared himself King of England. Richard of Bordeaux and Henry of Bolingbroke, cousins born just three months apart, were ten years old when Richard became king of England. They were thirty-two when Henry deposed him and became king in his place. Now, the story behind one of the strangest and most fateful events in English history (and the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s most celebrated history plays) is brought to vivid life by the acclaimed author of Blood and Roses, Helen Castor. Richard had birthright on his side, and a profound belief in his own God-given majesty. But beyond that, he lacked all qualities of leadership. A narcissist who did not understand or accept the principles that underpinned his rule, he was neither a warrior defending his kingdom, nor a lawgiver whose justice protected his people. Instead, he declared that “his laws were in his own mouth,� and acted accordingly. He sought to define as treason any resistance to his will and recruited a private army loyal to himself rather than the realm—and he intended to destroy those who tried to restrain him. Henry was everything Richard was a leader who inspired both loyalty and friendship, a soldier and a chivalric hero, dutiful, responsible, principled. After years of tension and conflict, Richard banished him and seized his vast inheritance. Richard had been crowned a king but he had become a tyrant, and as a tyrant—ruling by arbitrary will rather than established law—he was deposed by his cousin Henry, the only possible candidate to take his place. Henry was welcomed as a liberator, a champion of the people against his predecessor’s paranoid despotism. But within months he too was facing rebellion. Men knew that a deposer could in turn be deposed, and the new king found himself buffeted by unrest and by chronic ill-health until he seemed a shadow of his former self, trapped by political uncertainty and troubled by these signs that God might not, after all, endorse his actions. Captivating, immersive, and highly relevant to today’s times, The Eagle and the Hart is a story about what happens when a ruler prioritizes power over the interests of his own people. When a ruler demands loyalty to himself as an individual, rather than duty to the established constitution, and when he seeks to reshape reality rather than concede the force of verifiable truths. Above all, it is a story about how a nation was brought to the brink of catastrophe and disintegration—and, in the end, how it was brought back.]]> 528 Helen Castor 0241419328 Caroline 4 4.40 2024 The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV
author: Helen Castor
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/07
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves: english-history, medieval-history
review:

]]> The Peepshow 212700035 'Once more, Kate Summerscale shatters our preconceptions of a classic crime' Val McDermid

From Britain's top-selling true crime writer and author of Sunday Times #1 bestseller THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER...

London, 1953. Police discover the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy terrace house in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they find another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. But they have already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place, three years ago, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man?

A nationwide manhunt is launched for the tenant of the ground-floor flat, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. Star reporter Harry Procter chases after the scoop. Celebrated crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse begs to be assigned to the case. The story becomes an instant sensation, and with the relentless rise of the tabloid press the public watches on like never before. Who is Christie? Why did he choose to kill women, and to keep their bodies near him? As Harry and Fryn start to learn the full horror of what went on at Rillington Place, they realise that Christie might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice in plain sight.

In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie's victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house.

'A forensic reappraisal of a grimy episode in postwar British history ... Shocking, impeccably researched, lucidly written and always utterly compelling' Graeme Macrae Burnet]]> 317 Kate Summerscale 1526660490 Caroline 3 british-history, true-crime 3.88 2024 The Peepshow
author: Kate Summerscale
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/04
date added: 2024/11/04
shelves: british-history, true-crime
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures]]> 208430625 From the award-winning author Katherine Rundell comes a “rare and magical book� (Bill Bryson) reckoning with the vanishing wonders of our natural world.

The world is more astonishing, more miraculous, and more wonderful than our wildestimaginings. In this brilliant and passionately persuasive book, Katherine Rundell takes us on a globe-spanning tour of the world's most awe-inspiring animals currently facing extinction.

Consider the seahorse: couples mate for life and meet each morning for a dance, pirouetting and changing colors before going their separate ways, to dance again the next day. The American wood frog survives winter by allowing itself to freeze solid, its heartbeat slowing until it stops altogether. Come spring, the heart kick-starts itself spontaneously back to life. As for the lemur, it lives in matriarchal troops led by an alpha female (it’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive). Whenever they are cold or frightened, they group together in what’s known as a lemur ball, paws and tails intertwined, to form a furry mass as big as a bicycle wheel.

But each of these extraordinary animals is endangered or holds a sub-species that is endangered. This urgent, inspiring book of essays dedicated to 23 unusual and underappreciated creatures is a clarion call insisting that we look at the world around us with new eyes—to see the magic of the animals we live among, their unknown histories and capabilities, and above all how lucky we are to tread the same ground as such vanishing treasures.

Beautifully illustrated, and full of inimitable wit and intellect, Vanishing Treasures is a chance to be awestruck and lovestruck, to reckon with the beauty of the world, its fragility, and its strangeness.]]> 224 Katherine Rundell 0385550820 Caroline 0 to-read 4.17 2024 Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures
author: Katherine Rundell
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem]]> 15925331
The infamous Salem trials are etched into the consciousness of modern America, the human toll a reminder of the dangers of intolerance and persecution. The refrain "Remember Salem!" was invoked frequently over the ensuing centuries. As time passed, the trials became a milepost measuring the distance America had progressed from its colonial past, its victims now the the righteous and their persecutors the shamed. Yet the story of witchcraft did not end as the American Enlightenment dawned -- a new, long, and chilling chapter was about to begin.

Witchcraft after Salem was not just a story of fireside tales, legends, and superstitions; it continued to be a matter of life and death, souring the American dream for many. We know of more people killed as witches between 1692 and the 1950s than were executed before it. Witches were part of the story of the decimation of the Native Americans, the experience of slavery and emancipation, and the immigrant experience; they were embedded in the religious and social history of the country. Yet the history of American witchcraft between the 18th and the 20th century also tells a less traumatic story, on that shows how different cultures interacted and shaped each other's languages and beliefs.

This is therefore much more than the tale of one persecuted community: it opens a fascinating window on the fears, prejudices, hopes, and dreams of the American people as their country rose from colony to superpower.]]> 304 Owen Davies 0199578710 Caroline 3 3.56 2013 America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem
author: Owen Davies
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/02
date added: 2024/11/02
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (New Narratives in American History)]]> 982464 Drawing on eyewitness testimony, Richard Godbeer tells the story of Kate Branch, a seventeen-year-old afflicted by strange visions and given to blood-chilling wails of pain and fright. Branch accused several women of bewitching her, two of whom were put on trial for witchcraft. Escaping Salem takes us inside the Connecticut courtroom and into the minds of the surprisingly skeptical Stamford townspeople. Were the pain and screaming due to natural or supernatural causes? Was Branch simply faking the symptoms? And if she was indeed bewitched, why believe her specific accusations, since her information came from demons who might well be lying? For the judges, Godbeer shows, the trial was a legal thicket. All agreed that witches posed a real and serious threat, but proving witchcraft (an invisible crime) in court was another matter. The court in Salem had become mired in controversy over its use of dubious evidence. In an intriguing chapter, Godbeer examines Magistrate Jonathan Selleck's
notes on how to determine the guilt of someone accused of witchcraft, providing an illuminating look at what constituted proof of witchcraft at the time. The stakes were high--if found guilty, the two accused women would be hanged.
In the afterword, Godbeer explains how he used the trial evidence to build his narrative, offering an inside perspective on the historian's craft. Featuring maps, photos, and a selected bibliography, Escaping Salem is ideal for use in undergraduate U.S. survey courses. It can also be used for courses in colonial American history, culture, and religion; witchcraft in the early modern world; and crime and society in early America.]]> 192 Richard Godbeer 0195161300 Caroline 0 to-read 3.44 2004 Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (New Narratives in American History)
author: Richard Godbeer
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft and Conflict in Early New England]]> 2015379 256 Emerson W. Baker 1403972079 Caroline 0 to-read 3.52 2007 The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft and Conflict in Early New England
author: Emerson W. Baker
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Trader, The Owner, The Slave: Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery]]> 3615806 Amazing Grace, was a slave captain who marshaled his human cargoes with a brutality that he looked back on with shame and contrition. Thomas Thistlewood (1721�86) lived his life in a remote corner of western Jamaica and his unique diary provides some of the most revealing images of a slave owner’s life in the most valuable of all British slave colonies. Olaudah Equiano (1745�97) was practically unknown 30years ago, but is now an iconic figure in black history and his experience as a slave speaks out for lives of millions who went unrecorded. All three men were contemporaries; they even came close to each other at different points of the Atlantic compass. But what held them together, in its destructive gravitational pull, was the Atlantic slave system.]]> 336 James Walvin 0712667636 Caroline 0 to-read 3.81 2007 The Trader, The Owner, The Slave: Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery
author: James Walvin
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Missing Thread: A Women's History of the Ancient World]]> 201102381 Spanning 3,000 years, from the birth of Minoan Crete to the death of the Julio-Claudian dynasty in Rome, a magisterial new history of the ancient world told, for the very first time, through women.

For centuries, men have been writing histories of antiquity filled with warlords, emperors and kings. But when it comes to incorporating women aside from Cleopatra and Boudica, writers have been more comfortable describing mythical heroines than real ones.

While Penelope and Helen of Troy live on in the imagination, their real-life counterparts have been relegated to the margins. In The Missing Thread, Daisy Dunn inverts this tradition and puts the women of history at the centre of the narrative.

These pages present Enheduanna, the earliest named author, the poet Sappho and Telesilla, who defended her city from attack. Here is Artemisia, sole female commander in the Graeco-Persian Wars, and Cynisca, the first female victor at the Olympic Games. Cleopatra may be the more famous, but Fulvia, Mark Antony's wife, fought a war on his behalf. Many other women remain nameless but integral.

Through new examination of the sources combined with vivid storytelling Daisy Dunn shows us the ancient world through fresh eyes, and introduces us to an incredible cast of ancient women, weavers of an entire world.]]> 480 Daisy Dunn 0593299663 Caroline 3 3.73 2024 The Missing Thread: A Women's History of the Ancient World
author: Daisy Dunn
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/24
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: ancient-history, women-s-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Once & Future Witch Hunt: A Descendant's Reckoning from Salem to the Present]]> 199739644
In 1692, Martha Allen Carrier was hanged in the Salem witch trials as the "Queen of Hell." Three hundred years later, her nine-times-great-granddaughter, Alice Markham-Cantor, set out to discover why Martha had died. As she chased her ancestor through the archives, graveyards, and haunted places of New England, grappling with what we owe the past, Alice discovered a shocking truth: witch hunts didn't end in Salem.

Extensively researched and told through alternating fiction and non-fiction chapters, The Once & Future Witch Hunt does not treat Salem as a cautionary tale. It treats Salem as an instruction manual—not on how to perform witch hunts, but how to stop them.

Foreword by Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author.

Afterword by Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch.]]> 318 Alice Markham-Cantor 0738777234 Caroline 2 american-history 4.08 The Once & Future Witch Hunt: A Descendant's Reckoning from Salem to the Present
author: Alice Markham-Cantor
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.08
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/19
date added: 2024/10/19
shelves: american-history
review:

]]> The Burning of Bridget Cleary 1086565 In 1895, Bridget Cleary, a strong-minded and independent young woman, disappeared from her house in rural Tipperary. At first her family claimed she had been taken by fairies-but then her badly burned body was found in a shallow grave. Bridget's husband, father, aunt, and four cousins were arrested and tried for murder, creating one of the first mass media sensations in Ireland and England as people tried to make sense of what had happened. Meanwhile, Tory newspapers in Ireland and Britain seized on the scandal to discredit the cause of Home Rule, playing on lingering fears of a savage Irish peasantry. Combining historical detective work, acute social analysis, and meticulous original scholarship, Angela Bourke investigates Bridget's murder.]]> 279 Angela Bourke 0141002026 Caroline 0 to-read 3.48 1999 The Burning of Bridget Cleary
author: Angela Bourke
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Something Wicked: The Lives, Crimes and Deaths of the Pendle Witches]]> 131140039
Today, a thriving tourism industry exists in and around Pendle, the former home of the so-called witches, yet virtually everything we know about the case originates from a single Thomas Potts' Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches, hurriedly published in 1613 and distinctly skewed in favour of the prosecution. Until now...

Sunday Times bestselling author Carol Ann Lee brings an entirely fresh perspective to the story by approaching it as true crime. Having worked in the genre for more than a decade, her research leads to revelatory discoveries, transforming our knowledge of those shadowy figures behind ill-famed names, and the terrible events that befell them.

After four centuries of superstition and surmise, the two central, warring families - each headed by a fiercely independent widow working as 'cunning women' - emerge fully formed, as the book uncovers the reality of their lives and their alleged crimes before exploring the trial and executions.

Along the way, we uncover the truth behind some of the story's most enduring the legend of Malkin Tower and the final resting place of the Pendle witches.
This is a ground-breaking book that will take the reader on a spellbinding journey into the dark heart of England's largest and most notorious witch trial.]]> 463 LEE CAROL ANN 1789465850 Caroline 3 english-history 3.76 2024 Something Wicked: The Lives, Crimes and Deaths of the Pendle Witches
author: LEE CAROL ANN
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/16
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: english-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts]]> 208580677


The letter to the Romans was not the only extraordinary piece in the Green collection. They soon announced newly recovered fragments from the Gospels and writings of Sappho. Mazza's quest to confirm the provenance of these priceless fragments revealed shadowy global networks that make big business of ancient manuscripts, from the Greens' Museum of the Bible and world-famous auction houses like Sotheby's and Christie's, to antique shops in Jerusalem and Istanbul, dealers on eBay, and into the collections of renowned museums and universities.



Mazza's investigation forces us to ask what happens when the supposed custodians of our ancient heritage act in ways that threaten to destroy it. Stolen Fragments illuminates how these recent dealings are not isolated events, but the inevitable result of longstanding colonial practices and the outcome of generations of scholars who have profited from extracting the cultural heritage of places they claim they wish to preserve. Where is the boundary between protection and exploitation, between scholarship and larceny?]]> 272 Roberta Mazza 1503632504 Caroline 3 3.69 Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts
author: Roberta Mazza
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.69
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/10
date added: 2024/10/10
shelves:
review:

]]> Squanto: A Native Odyssey 210129439
American schoolchildren have long learned about Squanto, the welcoming Native who made the First Thanksgiving possible, but his story goes deeper than the holiday legend. Born in the Wampanoag-speaking town of Patuxet in the late 1500s, Squanto was kidnapped in 1614 by an English captain, who took him to Spain. From there, Englishmen brought him to London and Newfoundland before sending him home in 1619, when Squanto discovered that most of Patuxet had died in an epidemic. A year later, the Mayflower colonists arrived at his home and renamed it Plymouth.

Prize-winning historian Andrew Lipman explores the mysteries that still surround Squanto: How did he escape bondage and return home? Why did he help the English after an Englishman enslaved him? Why did he threaten Plymouth’s fragile peace with its neighbors with a daring plot that shocked colonists and Natives alike? Was it true that he converted to Christianity on his deathbed? Drawing from a wide range of evidence, Lipman reconstructs Squanto’s upbringing, his transatlantic odyssey, his career as an interpreter, his surprising downfall, and his enigmatic death. The result is a fresh look at an epic life that ended right when many Americans think their story begins.]]> 264 Andrew Lipman 0300238770 Caroline 3 american-history 3.91 2024 Squanto: A Native Odyssey
author: Andrew Lipman
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/08
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves: american-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare]]> 204593533 A dazzling portrait of Shakespeare as a young artist, revealing how his rich and complex queer life informed the plays and poems we treasure today “Was Shakespeare gay?� For years the question has sent experts and fans into a tailspin of confusion. But as scholar Will Tosh argues, this debate misses the sex, intimacy, and identity in Elizabethan England were infinitely more complex—and queer—than we have been taught. In this incisive biography, Tosh reveals William Shakespeare as a queer artist who drew on his society’s nuanced understanding of gender and sexuality to create some of English literature’s richest works. During Shakespeare’s time, same-sex desire was repressed and punished by the Church and state, but it was also articulated and sustained by institutions across England. Moving through the queer spaces of Shakespeare’s life—his Stratford schoolroom, smoky London taverns and playhouses, the royal court—Tosh shows how strongly Shakespeare’s early work was influenced by the queer culture of the time, much of it totally integrated into mainstream society. He also uncovers the surprising reason why Shakespeare veered away from his early work’s gender-bending homoeroticism. Offering a subversive sketch of Elizabethan England, Straight Acting uncovers Shakespeare as one of history’s great queer artists and completely reshapes the way we understand the Bard’s life and times.]]> 304 Will Tosh 1541602676 Caroline 4 4.28 2024 Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare
author: Will Tosh
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/05
date added: 2024/10/05
shelves: british-history, english-history, shakespeare
review:

]]> This Is Shakespeare 49919215
A genius and prophet whose timeless works encapsulate the human condition like no others. A writer who surpassed his contemporaries in vision, originality, and literary mastery. A man who wrote like an angel, putting it all so much better than anyone else.

Is this Shakespeare? Well, sort of.

But it doesn't tell us the whole truth. So much of what we say about Shakespeare is either not true, or just not relevant. Now, Emma Smith - an intellectually, theatrically, and ethically exciting writer - takes us into a world of politicking and copycatting, as we watch Shakespeare emulating the blockbusters of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, the Spielberg and Tarantino of their day; flirting with and skirting round the cutthroat issues of succession politics, religious upheaval, and technological change. Smith writes in strikingly modern ways about individual agency, privacy, politics, celebrity, and sex, and the Shakespeare she reveals in this book poses awkward questions rather than offering bland answers, always implicating us in working out what it might mean.]]> 368 Emma Smith 1524748544 Caroline 0 to-read 4.28 2019 This Is Shakespeare
author: Emma Smith
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Unknown Warrior: A Personal Journey of Discovery and Remembrance]]> 206185112 'It is rare to find a tale so strange, intimate and human yet at the same time so enormous, so global in its importance. Yet again John Nichol impresses us with his ability to weave together the little details and the grand narrative'
Dan Snow

***

Over one million British Empire soldiers were killed during the First World War. More than a century later, more than half a million still have no known grave.

The scale of the fighting, the destructive power of high explosive, and the combination of relentless military engagement and glutinous mud meant that many of the dead were never recovered or identified. Names were left without bodies, and bodies, or fragments of bodies, without names.

In an emotional personal journey, Sunday Times bestselling author John Nicholuncovers the dramatic story of the Unknown Warrior who lies in Westminster Abbey, and our nation’s deep-seated need to honour and mourn the fallen.

‘A Soldier of the Great War Known Unto God.�

Rudyard Kipling

In the aftermath of the First World War, an idea was born for a single ‘Unknown Warrior� to commemorate every one of the missing, and help staunch the tidal flow of national grief. Echoed most recently by the funeral of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, each phase of his burial ceremony was choreographed with military precision, love, and respect.

Former RAF Tornado Navigator and Gulf War prisoner-of-war John Nichol, retraces the Warrior’s journey home from the battlefields of Northern France to Westminster Abbey, talking to relatives of those involved and researching long-forgotten archives.

How did the plan take shape? Who was this ‘unknown� man? How was he chosen, and from where? What were the logistical challenges of repatriating a single body, whilst retaining its total anonymity?

To help shine light on the 100-year-old story, John seeks out modern experts in battlefield trauma, the recovery of the slain, and the complexities of ceremonial interment on a grand scale.

And speaking to those who have lost loved ones in more recent conflicts, he meditates upon our continuing need of a tangible resting place at which to truly grieve the fallen.

Drawing on his own experience of military service and combat, Nichol explores the way individuals and nations have marked the sacrifice of their dead across the ages.

Above all, The Unknown Warrior is a search for the true meaning of camaraderie, service and remembrance.]]> 393 John Nichol 1398509469 Caroline 5 british-history, world-war-1 4.66 The Unknown Warrior: A Personal Journey of Discovery and Remembrance
author: John Nichol
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.66
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/02
date added: 2024/10/02
shelves: british-history, world-war-1
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Living Unknown Soldier: A Story of Grief and the Great War]]> 152425
In February 1918, a derelict soldier was discovered wandering the railway station in Lyon, France. With no memory of his name or past, no identifying possessions, marks, or documents, the soldier-given the name Anthelme Mangin-was sent to an asylum for the insane. When, after the Great War ended, the authorities placed the soldier's image in advertisements to locate his family, hundreds of "relatives" claimed him-as their father, son, husband, or brother who had failed to return from the front.

Marshaling a vast array of original material, from letters and newspaper articles to accounts of battlefield deaths, hospital reports, and police files, French historian Jean-Yves Le Naour meticulously re-creates the long-forgotten story of the single soldier who came to stand for a lost generation. With humane sympathy and the skill of a novelist, Le Naour recounts the twenty-year court battles waged by the families competing to take the amnesiac soldier home. In the process, he portrays not just the fate of one individual but the rank and file's experience in the trenches and an entire nation's great and inconsolable grief following a war that consumed the lives of one million men.

Dramatic, taut, and powerfully relevant to our own times, this heartrending history depicts the pain and turmoil of a society that, without bodies to bury, is caught between holding on and letting go.]]> 240 Jean-Yves Le Naour 0805079378 Caroline 0 to-read 3.88 2002 The Living Unknown Soldier: A Story of Grief and the Great War
author: Jean-Yves Le Naour
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading]]> 209564603 'A MARVEL' PHILIP PULLMAN

Do you remember the first time you fell in love with a book?

The stories we read as children extend far beyond our childhoods; they are a window into our deepest hopes, joys and anxieties. They reveal our past � collective and individual, remembered and imagined � and invite us to dream up different futures.

In a pioneering history of children’s literature, from the ancient world to the present day, Sam Leith reveals the magic of our most cherished stories, and the ways in which they have shaped and consoled entire generations. Excavating the complex lives of beloved writers, Leith offers a humane portrait of a genre � one acutely sensitive to its authors� distinct contexts.

***

'Profoundly erudite and gloriously entertaining, this is the most purely enjoyable literary history I have ever read.' Tom Holland

'A wonderful book that rediscovers the magic of childhood reading and explores the complexity of some of our best loved authors.' Nina Stibbe]]> 605 Sam Leith 0861548191 Caroline 5 4.33 2024 The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading
author: Sam Leith
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/28
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West]]> 8477745
In The Forge of Christendom , Tom Holland masterfully describes this remarkable new age, a time of caliphs and Viking sea kings, the spread of castles and the invention of knighthood. It was one of the most significant departure points in the emergence of Western Europe as a distinctive and expansionist power.]]> 463 Tom Holland 038553020X Caroline 4 medieval-history
Tom Holland chronicles the course of the centuries either side of 1000 AD, a time of much convulsion and upheaval: the 'birth pangs', as he calls it, of Western Europe. These were the years in which France was emerging from West Francia, a breakaway portion of the empire of the Franks, the empire of Charlemagne, who had been crowned emperor of the West in Rome itself and acknowledged as the western counterpart of the eastern emperor in Constantinople; in which the Scandinavia countries of Norway, Denmark, Iceland were turning away from Odin and the old gods and embracing Christianity; in which Vikings were settling, by force, in France and forming the land that would become Normandy; other Norsemen were settling further in the continent and becoming known as the Rus, eventually giving their name to Russia; yet more Normans were invading and conquering England, Sicily and southern Italy; the Muslim caliphate was splitting in two, with the Umayyad clan basing their dynasty in Cordoba in Muslim Spain, al-Andalus, and the Abbasid caliphate waging persistent war against the Byzantines.

And above all of this, the Church was establishing its grip, the power and influence of the Pope reaching into every kingdom - the secular and the spiritual no longer as separate as they had once been. Popes were claiming new powers and rights over kings, culminating in many kings coming under the papal sway as vassals, crowned and acknowledged by the Pope alone - in effect, the Pope was claiming that the whole of Christendom was subject to him and the Church. And in an act that would have lasting consequences, popes were coming to embracing the concept of a church-blessed 'holy war, a concept already well embedded in the Islamic jihad. In the space of two scant centuries, all this came to pass - and how much can be ascribed to 'millennial fever', to the fervid belief that the End of Days was nigh and the Antichrist due, with the thousand year anniversary of Christ' birth on the horizon, is the major theme of this book. The years before the turn of the millennium were dark and feverish, with many believing that the world was sinful and needed perfecting before the End of Days, giving rise to much of the impetus that propelled these changes.

Tom Holland is a marvellous writer - he has a tone that somehow manages to be wry and melodramatic at the same time, quite a skill. This isn't academic history, it is very much history for the uninformed, but there can be few authors better at painting such a sweep of history so enjoyably. I found the central theory of the millennial fever a little lacking, and it only really forms a central theme in the first half of the book. But I didn't enjoy this book any less for that. This is an era of history I've never been especially interested in - it's either Greek, Persian and Roman, or skipping over these middle years to get to 1066, but I could hardly put this book down.
]]> 3.95 2008 The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West
author: Tom Holland
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2016/02/16
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: medieval-history
review:
The years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the turn of the first millennium are generally known as the 'Dark Ages', an era of brutality, poverty, illiteracy, paganism and savagery, when all the advances of the Greek and Roman civilisations seemed to vanish as though they had never been, and the shape of the countries we know as England, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Denmark, were barely coming into focus. Such was the case in Western Europe, at least. There was no such Dark Age in the Islamic or Byzantine Empires. In these years, it would have been all but impossible to imagine a time, not so far in the future, when both these mighty empires would be toppled and Western Europe would stand triumphant, stable and orderly, crowned by the splendour and spiritual muscle of the Pope in Rome.

Tom Holland chronicles the course of the centuries either side of 1000 AD, a time of much convulsion and upheaval: the 'birth pangs', as he calls it, of Western Europe. These were the years in which France was emerging from West Francia, a breakaway portion of the empire of the Franks, the empire of Charlemagne, who had been crowned emperor of the West in Rome itself and acknowledged as the western counterpart of the eastern emperor in Constantinople; in which the Scandinavia countries of Norway, Denmark, Iceland were turning away from Odin and the old gods and embracing Christianity; in which Vikings were settling, by force, in France and forming the land that would become Normandy; other Norsemen were settling further in the continent and becoming known as the Rus, eventually giving their name to Russia; yet more Normans were invading and conquering England, Sicily and southern Italy; the Muslim caliphate was splitting in two, with the Umayyad clan basing their dynasty in Cordoba in Muslim Spain, al-Andalus, and the Abbasid caliphate waging persistent war against the Byzantines.

And above all of this, the Church was establishing its grip, the power and influence of the Pope reaching into every kingdom - the secular and the spiritual no longer as separate as they had once been. Popes were claiming new powers and rights over kings, culminating in many kings coming under the papal sway as vassals, crowned and acknowledged by the Pope alone - in effect, the Pope was claiming that the whole of Christendom was subject to him and the Church. And in an act that would have lasting consequences, popes were coming to embracing the concept of a church-blessed 'holy war, a concept already well embedded in the Islamic jihad. In the space of two scant centuries, all this came to pass - and how much can be ascribed to 'millennial fever', to the fervid belief that the End of Days was nigh and the Antichrist due, with the thousand year anniversary of Christ' birth on the horizon, is the major theme of this book. The years before the turn of the millennium were dark and feverish, with many believing that the world was sinful and needed perfecting before the End of Days, giving rise to much of the impetus that propelled these changes.

Tom Holland is a marvellous writer - he has a tone that somehow manages to be wry and melodramatic at the same time, quite a skill. This isn't academic history, it is very much history for the uninformed, but there can be few authors better at painting such a sweep of history so enjoyably. I found the central theory of the millennial fever a little lacking, and it only really forms a central theme in the first half of the book. But I didn't enjoy this book any less for that. This is an era of history I've never been especially interested in - it's either Greek, Persian and Roman, or skipping over these middle years to get to 1066, but I could hardly put this book down.

]]> <![CDATA[A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson]]> 202102004 A portrait of the fascinating, unusual and fruitful creative partnership between Fanny and Robert Louis StevensonThe romance between Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson was an unlikely Victorian love he was an ambitious but drifting college-educated writer from a prominent family in Scotland; she was a forceful and determined farm girl from Indiana with a high school education. She was married, with children, and 10 years his senior when they met in France in 1876. How could a union between them work?A Wilder Shore is a portrait of these two extraordinary people and a nuanced examination of the improbable union that stimulated, frustrated and ultimately sustained them. The book travels the world with the couple as they seek better health for him, a looser lifestyle and more creative freedom, beginning in an art colony outside Paris and ending in Samoa, where they lived and joined the native islanders� fight for independence from imperialist powers. Along the way, the ferment of the Stevensons� deeply loving but stormy marriage produced literary masterpieces by Robert such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.This sweeping love story of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson and their search for freedom and self-discovery opens up new perspectives on both writers, as well as showing how astonishingly modern they were for their times.]]> 480 Camille Peri 0670786195 Caroline 5 3.87 A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson
author: Camille Peri
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.87
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/23
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London]]> 1184786
Victorian London was a world where long-standing traditions of class and gender were challenged by a range of public spectacles, mass media scandals, new commercial spaces, and a proliferation of new sexual categories and identities. In the midst of this changing culture, women of many classes challenged the traditional privileges of elite males and
asserted their presence in the public domain.

An important catalyst in this conflict, argues Walkowitz, was W. T. Stead's widely read 1885 article about child prostitution. Capitalizing on the uproar caused by the piece and the volatile political climate of the time, women spoke of sexual danger, articulating their own grievances against men, inserting themselves into the public discussion of sex to an unprecedented extent, and gaining new entree to public spaces and journalistic practices. The ultimate manifestation of class anxiety and gender antagonism came in 1888 with the tabloid tales of Jack the Ripper. In between, there were quotidien stories of sexual possibility and urban adventure, and Walkowitz examines them all, showing how women were not simply figures in the imaginary landscape of male spectators, but also central actors in the stories of metropolotin life that reverberated in courtrooms, learned journals, drawing rooms, street corners, and in the letters columns of the daily press.

A model of cultural history, this ambitious book will stimulate and enlighten readers across a broad range of interests.]]> 368 Judith R. Walkowitz 0226871460 Caroline 0 to-read 3.92 1992 City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London
author: Judith R. Walkowitz
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom]]> 58986872
When Samuel Townsend died at his home in Madison County, Alabama, in November 1856, the fifty-two-year-old white planter left behind hundreds of slaves, thousands of acres of rich cotton land, and a net worth of approximately $200,000. In life, Samuel had done little to distinguish himself from other members of the South's elite slaveholding class. But he made a name for himself in death by leaving almost the entirety of his fortune to his five sons, four daughters, and two nieces: all of them his slaves.

In this deeply researched, movingly narrated portrait of the extended Townsend family, R. Isabela Morales reconstructs the migration of this mixed-race family across the American West and South over the second half of the nineteenth century. Searching for communities where they could exercise their newfound freedom and wealth to the fullest, members of the family homesteaded and attended college in Ohio and Kansas; fought for the Union Army in Mississippi; mined for silver in the Colorado Rockies; and, in the case of one son, returned to Alabama to purchase part of the old plantation where he had once been held as a slave. In Morales's telling, the Townsends' story maps a new landscape of opportunity and oppression, where the meanings of race and freedom--as well as opportunities for social and economic mobility--were dictated by highly local circumstances.

During the turbulent period between the Civil War and the rise of Jim Crow at the turn of the twentieth century, the Townsends carved out spaces where they were able to benefit from their money and mixed-race ancestry, pass down generational wealth, and realize some of their happy dreams of liberty.]]> 336 R. Isabela Morales 0197531792 Caroline 4 4.12 2022 Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom
author: R. Isabela Morales
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/15
date added: 2024/09/15
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (Indigenous Education)]]> 25363396
At the end of the nineteenth century, Indigenous boarding schools were touted as the means for solving the “Indian problem� in both the United States and Canada. With the goal of permanently transforming Indigenous young people into Europeanized colonial subjects, the schools were ultimately a means for eliminating Indigenous communities as obstacles to land acquisition, resource extraction, and nation-building. Andrew Woolford analyzes the formulation of the “Indian problem� as a policy concern in the United States and Canada and examines how the “solution� of Indigenous boarding schools was implemented in Manitoba and New Mexico through complex chains that included multiple government offices with a variety of staffs, Indigenous peoples, and even nonhuman actors such as poverty, disease, and space. The genocidal project inherent in these boarding schools, however, did not unfold in either nation without diversion, resistance, and unintended consequences.

Inspired by the signing of the 2007 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement in Canada, which provided a truth and reconciliation commission and compensation for survivors of residential schools, This Benevolent Experiment offers a multilayered, comparative analysis of Indigenous boarding schools in the United States and Canada. Because of differing historical, political, and structural influences, the two countries have arrived at two very different responses to the harm caused by assimilative education.

]]> 448 Andrew Woolford 0803276729 Caroline 0 to-read 4.04 2015 This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (Indigenous Education)
author: Andrew Woolford
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928]]> 1033555
Education for Extinction offers the first comprehensive account of this dispiriting effort. Much more than a study of federal Indian policy, this book vividly details the day-to-day experiences of Indian youth living in a "total institution" designed to reconstruct them both psychologically and culturally. The assault on identity came in many the shearing off of braids, the assignment of new names, uniformed drill routines, humiliating punishments, relentless attacks on native religious beliefs, patriotic indoctrinations, suppression of tribal languages, Victorian gender rituals, football contests, and industrial training.

Especially poignant is Adams's description of the ways in which students resisted or accommodated themselves to forced assimilation. Many converted to varying degrees, but others plotted escapes, committed arson, and devised ingenious strategies of passive resistance. Adams also argues that many of those who seemingly cooperated with the system were more than passive players in this drama, that the response of accommodation was not synonymous with cultural surrender. This is especially apparent in his analysis of students who returned to the reservation. He reveals the various ways in which graduates struggled to make sense of their lives and selectively drew upon their school experience in negotiating personal and tribal survival in a world increasingly dominated by white men.

The discussion comes full circle when Adams reviews the government's gradual retreat from the assimilationist vision. Partly because of persistent student resistance, but also partly because of a complex and sometimes contradictory set of progressive, humanitarian, and racist motivations, policymakers did eventually come to view boarding schools less enthusiastically

Based upon extensive use of government archives, Indian and teacher autobiographies, and school newspapers, Adams's moving account is essential reading for scholars and general readers alike interested in Western history, Native American studies, American race relations, education history, and multiculturalism.]]> 396 David Wallace Adams 0700608389 Caroline 0 to-read 3.99 1995 Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928
author: David Wallace Adams
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Postmortem: How Medical Examiners Explain Suspicious Deaths (Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries)]]> 123573
Postmortem goes deep inside the world of medical examiners to uncover the intricate web of social, legal, and moral issues in which they operate. Stefan Timmermans spent years in a medical examiner’s office following cases, interviewing examiners, and watching autopsies. While he relates fascinating cases here, he is also more broadly interested in the cultural authority and responsibilities that come with being a medical examiner. How medical examiners speak to the livingon behalf of the dead is Timmermans’s subject, revealed here in the day-to-day lives of the examiners themselves. � Postmortem is a wake-up call to forensic pathology. . . .This book should be viewed as provocative, rather than threatening, and should be a stimulus for important discussions and action by the forensic pathology community.”� Journal of the American Medical Association]]> 384 Stefan Timmermans 0226803996 Caroline 2 3.76 2006 Postmortem: How Medical Examiners Explain Suspicious Deaths (Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries)
author: Stefan Timmermans
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2006
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/12
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves:
review:

]]> A House Full of Daughters 26883535
But then Juliet, a renowned historian, started to question. As she did so, she sifted fact from fiction, uncovering details and secrets long held just out of sight.

A House Full of Daughters takes us through seven generations of women. In the nineteenth-century slums of Malaga, the salons of fin-de-siècle Washington DC, an English boarding school during the Second World War, Chelsea in the 1960s, the knife-edge that was New York City in the 1980s, these women emerge for Juliet as people in their own right, but also as part of who she is and where she has come from.

Juliet finds uncomfortable patterns reflected in these distant and more recent versions of herself. She realises her challenge is to embrace the good and reject the hazards that have trapped past generations.

A House Full of Daughters is one woman’s investigation into the nature of family, memory, the past � and, above all, love. It brings with it messages of truth and hope for us all.]]> 336 Juliet Nicolson 0374172455 Caroline 0 to-read 3.71 2016 A House Full of Daughters
author: Juliet Nicolson
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs]]> 201319612 The bestselling author of Lost Connections and Stolen Focus offers a revelatory look at the drugs upending weight loss as we knew it—from his personal experience on Ozempic to what these drugs mean for our society’s deeply dysfunctional relationship with food, weight, and our bodiesIn January 2023, bestselling author Johann Hari started to inject himself once a week with Ozempic, the diabetes drug that produces significant weight loss. Hewasn’t alone—credible predictions suggest that in two years, a quarter of the U.S. population will be taking this class of drug. Proponents say that this is a biological solution to a biological problem. While 95 percent of diets fail, the average person taking one of the new drugs will lose a quarter of their body weight in six months, and keep it off for as long as they take it. Here is a moment of liberation from an illness that massively increases your chances of diabetes, dementia, and cancer, and causes 10 percent of all deaths.Still, Hari was wildly conflicted. The massive rise in obesity rates around the world in the last half century didn’t happen because something went wrong with human biology. It happened because something went disastrously wrong with our We began to eat food designed to be maximally addictive. We built cities that are impossible to walk or bike around. We became much more stressed, making us seek out more comfort snacks. From this perspective, the new weight loss drugs arrive at a moment of madness. We built a food system that poisons us, then decided en masse to inject ourselves with a different potential poison that puts us off all food.A personal journey through weight loss combined with scientific evidence from experts, Magic Pill explores, as only Hari can, questions How did we get to this point? What does it reveal about our society that we couldn’t solve this problem socially, and instead turned to potentially risky pharmaceutical solutions? And will this free us from social pressure to conform to an ideal body type—or make that pressure even more dangerously intense?]]> 320 Johann Hari 0593728637 Caroline 4 4.27 2024 Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs
author: Johann Hari
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/06
date added: 2024/09/06
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-century London]]> 60465387 Dickensian London is brought to real and vivid life in this innovative, accessible social history, revealing the true character of this place and time through the stories of its street denizens� shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2023


London, 1857: A pair of teenage girls holding a sign that says “Fugitive Slaves� ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end up in court, where national newspapers pick up their story. Are the girls truly escaped slaves from Kentucky? Or will the city’s dystopian Mendicity Society catch them in a lie, exposing them as born-and-raised Londoners and endangering their safety?


With its many accounts of people like these who lived and made their living on the streets,Vagabondsforms a moving picture of London’s most compelling period (1780�1870). Piecing together contemporary sources such as newspaper articles, letters, and journal entries, historian Oskar Jensen follows the harrowing, hopeful journeys of the city’s poor: children, immigrants, street performers, thieves, and sex workers, all diverse in gender, ethnicity, ability, and origin. For the first time, their own voices give us a radical new perspective on this moment in history, with its deep inequality that bears an astonishing resemblance to our own era’s divides.

]]> 368 Oskar Jensen 071565439X Caroline 5 3.77 Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-century London
author: Oskar Jensen
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.77
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/03
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels]]> 177185884
For centuries, people who died destitute or alone were buried in potter’s fields—a Dickensian end that even the most hard-pressed families tried to avoid. Today, more and more relatives are abandoning their dead, leaving it to local governments to dispose of the bodies. Up to 150,000 Americans now go unclaimed each year. Who are they? Why are they being forgotten? And what is the meaning of life if your death doesn’t matter to others?

In this extraordinary work of narrative nonfiction, eight years in the making, sociologists Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans uncover a hidden social world. They follow four individuals in Los Angeles, tracing the twisting, poignant paths that put each at risk of going unclaimed, and introducing us to the scene investigators, notification officers, and crematorium workers who care for them when no one else will.

The Unclaimed lays bare the difficult truth that anyone can be abandoned. It forces us to confront a variety of social ills, from the fracturing of families and the loneliness of cities to the toll of rising inequality. But it is also filled with unexpected moments of tenderness. In Boyle Heights, a Mexican American neighborhood not far from the glitter of Hollywood, hundreds of strangers come together each year to mourn the deaths of people they never knew. These ceremonies, springing up across the country, reaffirm our shared humanity and help mend our frayed social fabric.

Beautifully crafted and profoundly empathetic, The Unclaimed urges us to expand our circle of caring—in death and in life.]]> 336 Pamela Prickett 0593239059 Caroline 4 4.02 2024 The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels
author: Pamela Prickett
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History]]> 59785515
' I've waited so long so read a comprehensively researched book about Black history on this island. This is a journey of discovery and a truly exciting and important work' Zainab Abbas

Despite the best efforts of researchers and campaigners, there remains today a steadfast tendency to reduce the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain to a simple it is one that begins in 1948 with the arrival of a single ship, the Empire Windrush, and continues mostly apart from a distinct British history, overlapping only on occasion amid grotesque injustice or pioneering protest.

Yet, as acclaimed historian Hakim Adi demonstrates, from the very beginning, from the moment humans first stood on this rainy isle, there have been African and Caribbean men and women set at Britain's heart. Libyan legionaries patrolled Hadrian's Wall while Rome's first 'African Emperor' died in York. In Elizabethan England, 'Black Tudors' served in the land's most eminent households while intrepid African explorers helped Sir Francis Drake to circumnavigate the globe. And, as Britain became a major colonial and commercial power, it was African and Caribbean people who led the radical struggle for freedom - a struggle which raged throughout the twentieth century and continues today in Black Lives Matter campaigns.

Charting a course through British history with an unobscured view of the actions of African and Caribbean people, Adi reveals how much our greatest collective achievements - universal suffrage, our victory over fascism, the forging of the NHS - owe to these men and women, and how, in understanding our history in these terms, we are more able to fully understand our present moment.]]> 448 Hakim Adi 0241583829 Caroline 3 3.78 African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History
author: Hakim Adi
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.78
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/30
date added: 2024/08/30
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World]]> 6437447
Horwitz decides to find out, and in A Voyage Long and Strange he uncovers the neglected story of America s founding by Europeans. He begins a thousand years ago, with the Vikings, and then tells the dramatic tale of conquistadors, castaways, French voyageurs, Moorish slaves, and many others who roamed and rampaged across half the states of the present-day U.S. continent, long before the Mayflower landed.

To explore this history and its legacy in the present, Horwitz embarks on an epic quest of his own trekking in search of grape-rich Vinland, Ponce de León s Fountain of Youth, Coronado s Cities of Gold, Walter Raleigh s Lost Colonists, and other mysteries of early America. And everywhere he goes, Horwitz probes the revealing gap between fact and legend, between what we enshrine and what we forget.

An irresistible blend of history, myth, and misadventure, A Voyage Long and Strange allows us to rediscover the New World for ourselves.]]> 695 Tony Horwitz 1594132984 Caroline 3 wishlist, american-history 3.57 2008 A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World
author: Tony Horwitz
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/26
date added: 2024/08/26
shelves: wishlist, american-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Monster's Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World]]> 58085265
In the dust of the Gilded Age Bone Wars, two vastly different men emerge with a mission to fill the empty halls of New York’s struggling American Museum of Natural History: Henry Fairfield Osborn, a privileged socialite whose reputation rests on the museum’s success, and intrepid Kansas-born fossil hunter Barnum Brown.

When Brown unearths the first Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils in the Montana wilderness, forever changing the world of paleontology, Osborn sees a path to save his museum from irrelevancy. With four-foot-long jaws capable of crushing the bones of its prey and hips that powered the animal to run at speeds of 25 miles per hour, the T. Rex suggests a prehistoric ecosystem more complex than anyone imagined. As the public turns out in droves to cower before this bone-chilling giant of the past and wonder at the mysteries of its disappearance, Brown and Osborn together turn dinosaurs from a biological oddity into a beloved part of culture.

Vivid and engaging, The Monster’s Bones journeys from prehistory to present day, from remote Patagonia to the unforgiving badlands of the American West to the penthouses of Manhattan. With a wide-ranging cast of robber barons, eugenicists, and opportunistic cowboys, New York Times best-selling author David K. Randall reveals how a monster of a bygone era ignited a new understanding of our planet and our place within it.]]> 288 David K. Randall 1324006536 Caroline 4 popular-science, dinosaurs 3.81 2022 The Monster's Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World
author: David K. Randall
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/07/04
date added: 2024/08/24
shelves: popular-science, dinosaurs
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Fossil Legends of the First Americans]]> 434752

Beginning in the East, with its Ice Age monsters, and ending in the West, where dinosaurs lived and died, this richly illustrated and elegantly written book examines the discoveries of enormous bones and uses of fossils for medicine, hunting magic, and spells. Well before Columbus, Native Americans observed the mysterious petrified remains of extinct creatures and sought to understand their transformation to stone. In perceptive creation stories, they visualized the remains of extinct mammoths, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine creatures as Monster Bears, Giant Lizards, Thunder Birds, and Water Monsters. Their insights, some so sophisticated that they anticipate modern scientific theories, were passed down in oral histories over many centuries.


Drawing on historical sources, archaeology, traditional accounts, and extensive personal interviews, Adrienne Mayor takes us from Aztec and Inca fossil tales to the traditions of the Iroquois, Navajos, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Pawnees. Fossil Legends of the First Americans represents a major step forward in our understanding of how humans made sense of fossils before evolutionary theory developed.]]> 489 Adrienne Mayor 0691130493 Caroline 4
It's a fascinating read, although it didn't enthral me in quite the same way as her other book. Part of my issue was the approach, I have to confess. For a start, it would be impossible to replicate the thoughts and beliefs of earlier generations of Native Americans; for all that their culture is predominately oral, it is virtually impossible to believe that modern stories and myths can have been handed down over decades and centuries within any change, modification or influence from current knowledge. Unlike a Greek vase or a Roman tablet, there is no way of ascertaining just how old a story may be. A storyteller saying it has been passed from his grandfather's grandfather's grandfather is not evidence.

I can well believe that earlier generations of Native Americans, both pre- and post-Columbian, will have incorporated the fossils and remains into their belief systems, that stories of Thunder Beings and Water Monsters may have been inspired by the scattered remains of gigantic creatures, that Native Americans may have shown much more awareness of 'deep time' and geological epochs, of extinction events, climate change and climatic disasters, than pre-Darwinian Europeans may have. But relying of stories told now as evidence of what people believed then, is just too much of a stretch for me. But it's an interesting theory, one I well believe, and given how well it ties into the arguments in her previous book about the Greeks and Romans, it's a theory that I think holds up, despite the lack of empirical evidence - and certainly I think more attention needs to be paid by the academic community to what Native American myths and legends may reveal about intellectual sophistication and ancestral knowledge.]]> 4.05 2005 Fossil Legends of the First Americans
author: Adrienne Mayor
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2014/05/15
date added: 2024/08/24
shelves: american-history, ancient-history, dinosaurs
review:
This book is in very much a similar vein to Adrienne Mayor's earlier book, The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times, tracing evidence, via literature, folklore and myth, of the awareness of ancient cultures of prehistoric fossils. She set herself a much harder task in this book, in tracing Native American awareness and understanding of fossil remains via stories and myth-making, since most Native cultures are oral and therefore prior to the relatively modern era left little in the way of written evidence of myths and beliefs.

It's a fascinating read, although it didn't enthral me in quite the same way as her other book. Part of my issue was the approach, I have to confess. For a start, it would be impossible to replicate the thoughts and beliefs of earlier generations of Native Americans; for all that their culture is predominately oral, it is virtually impossible to believe that modern stories and myths can have been handed down over decades and centuries within any change, modification or influence from current knowledge. Unlike a Greek vase or a Roman tablet, there is no way of ascertaining just how old a story may be. A storyteller saying it has been passed from his grandfather's grandfather's grandfather is not evidence.

I can well believe that earlier generations of Native Americans, both pre- and post-Columbian, will have incorporated the fossils and remains into their belief systems, that stories of Thunder Beings and Water Monsters may have been inspired by the scattered remains of gigantic creatures, that Native Americans may have shown much more awareness of 'deep time' and geological epochs, of extinction events, climate change and climatic disasters, than pre-Darwinian Europeans may have. But relying of stories told now as evidence of what people believed then, is just too much of a stretch for me. But it's an interesting theory, one I well believe, and given how well it ties into the arguments in her previous book about the Greeks and Romans, it's a theory that I think holds up, despite the lack of empirical evidence - and certainly I think more attention needs to be paid by the academic community to what Native American myths and legends may reveal about intellectual sophistication and ancestral knowledge.
]]> <![CDATA[The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times]]> 1080806 The First Fossil Hunters. Through careful research and meticulous documentation, she convincingly shows that many of the giants and monsters of myth did have a basis in fact--in the enormous bones of long-extinct species that were once abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans.


As Mayor shows, the Greeks and Romans were well aware that a different breed of creatures once inhabited their lands. They frequently encountered the fossilized bones of these primeval beings, and they developed sophisticated concepts to explain the fossil evidence, concepts that were expressed in mythological stories. The legend of the gold-guarding griffin, for example, sprang from tales first told by Scythian gold-miners, who, passing through the Gobi Desert at the foot of the Altai Mountains, encountered the skeletons of Protoceratops and other dinosaurs that littered the ground.


Like their modern counterparts, the ancient fossil hunters collected and measured impressive petrified remains and displayed them in temples and museums; they attempted to reconstruct the appearance of these prehistoric creatures and to explain their extinction. Long thought to be fantasy, the remarkably detailed and perceptive Greek and Roman accounts of giant bone finds were actually based on solid paleontological facts. By reading these neglected narratives for the first time in the light of modern scientific discoveries, Adrienne Mayor illuminates a lost world of ancient paleontology. As Peter Dodson writes in his Foreword, "Paleontologists, classicists, and historians as well as natural history buffs will read this book with the greatest of delight--surprises abound."]]> 361 Adrienne Mayor 0691089779 Caroline 5
Mayor argues that we can in fact determine how the ancient Greeks and Romans incorporated these fossils into their worldview, via their art, literature and mythology. The mythical griffin, for example, she argues, was based on the skeletal remains of protoceratops preserved in the sands of the Gobi Desert. Or the legend of the Cyclops was based on the discovery of prehistoric elephant and mammoth skulls, the large hole in the skull for the trunk mistaken for a single eye socket.

Greek literature and historical records are full of reports of the findings of giants' and heroes' remains, all given the stamp of authenticity through Greek mythology, and often given ceremonial burials. Ajax, Achilles, Theseus, the list goes on. Scholars have traditionally dismissed these reports as the credulity of simpler minds in ages past, but these ancient peoples really did find giant bones. There is ample testimony of fossils found in temples and in sacred sites through Greece, Italy, Persia, Egypt, North Africa. Not having the benefit of our knowledge, they simply developed elaborate myth systems to explain their existence.

If nothing else, this book is a warning against the increasing silo-ization of academic scholarship. How many palaeontologists would be familiar enough with Greek and Roman art and literature to make the connection between their fossils and the ancients' monsters of myth? How many Greek scholars would recognise the physical similarities between a stylised griffin on a bronze bowl and the skeleton of a protoceratops? It's a rare author that can successfully combine Greek and Roman literature, folklore, art and mythology with history, geology, archaeology and palaeontology - but Adrienne Mayor more than succeeds. What a fascinating book this is! I could hardly put it down.]]> 4.01 2000 The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times
author: Adrienne Mayor
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2014/05/12
date added: 2024/08/24
shelves: mythology, ancient-history, dinosaurs
review:
Palaeontology seems like such a modern academic discipline, one that relies very much on advances in modern scientific knowledge. We know now how and why fossils are created, what they are and where they came from - but I suspect many people, like myself, have rarely stopped to think about how our ancestors may have viewed these massive bones and relics. In the modern era we go looking for such things, but hundreds and thousands of years ago people often just stumbled across them, via agriculture, erosion, climatic upheaval. What did they think they were?

Mayor argues that we can in fact determine how the ancient Greeks and Romans incorporated these fossils into their worldview, via their art, literature and mythology. The mythical griffin, for example, she argues, was based on the skeletal remains of protoceratops preserved in the sands of the Gobi Desert. Or the legend of the Cyclops was based on the discovery of prehistoric elephant and mammoth skulls, the large hole in the skull for the trunk mistaken for a single eye socket.

Greek literature and historical records are full of reports of the findings of giants' and heroes' remains, all given the stamp of authenticity through Greek mythology, and often given ceremonial burials. Ajax, Achilles, Theseus, the list goes on. Scholars have traditionally dismissed these reports as the credulity of simpler minds in ages past, but these ancient peoples really did find giant bones. There is ample testimony of fossils found in temples and in sacred sites through Greece, Italy, Persia, Egypt, North Africa. Not having the benefit of our knowledge, they simply developed elaborate myth systems to explain their existence.

If nothing else, this book is a warning against the increasing silo-ization of academic scholarship. How many palaeontologists would be familiar enough with Greek and Roman art and literature to make the connection between their fossils and the ancients' monsters of myth? How many Greek scholars would recognise the physical similarities between a stylised griffin on a bronze bowl and the skeleton of a protoceratops? It's a rare author that can successfully combine Greek and Roman literature, folklore, art and mythology with history, geology, archaeology and palaeontology - but Adrienne Mayor more than succeeds. What a fascinating book this is! I could hardly put it down.
]]> <![CDATA[The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World]]> 57693295
"This is top-drawer science writing." ―Publishers Weekly, starred review

In The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Riley Black walks readers through what happened in the days, the years, the centuries, and the million years after the impact, tracking the sweeping disruptions that overtook this one spot, and imagining what might have been happening elsewhere on the globe. Life’s losses were sharp and deeply-felt, but the hope carried by the beings that survived sets the stage for the world as we know it now.

Picture yourself in the Cretaceous period. It’s a sunny afternoon in the Hell Creek of ancient Montana 66 million years ago. A Triceratops horridus ambles along the edge of the forest. In a matter of hours, everything here will be wiped away. Lush verdure will be replaced with fire. Tyrannosaurus rex will be toppled from their throne, along with every other species of non-avian dinosaur no matter their size, diet, or disposition. They just don’t know it yet.

The cause of this disaster was identified decades ago. An asteroid some seven miles across slammed into the Earth, leaving a geologic wound over 50 miles in diameter. In the terrible mass extinction that followed, more than half of known species vanished seemingly overnight. But this worst single day in the history of life on Earth was as critical for us as it was for the dinosaurs, as it allowed for evolutionary opportunities that were closed for the previous 100 million years.

"This is pop science that reads like a fantasy novel, but backed up by hard facts and the latest fossil discoveries. Black is pioneering a new narrative prehistorical nonfiction." � Steve Brusatte, New York Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs]]> 287 Riley Black 1250271045 Caroline 5 dinosaurs 3.88 2022 The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World
author: Riley Black
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/17
date added: 2024/08/24
shelves: dinosaurs
review:

]]> The Dinosaur Hunters 1992919 374 Deborah Cadbury 1857029593 Caroline 4 british-history, dinosaurs
Obviously fossils had long been scientific curiosities, and in other places around the world giant bones and skeletons had been emerging from the earth for centuries. But it wasn't really until the advent of the science of geology that scientists began to examine what remains of creatures embedded within rock actually meant, what the different layers of rock signified about different eras in history, and how this new fossil record cast doubt on the Biblical explanation of human history. Two British scientists were at the forefront of these discoveries - Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen, the latter being the man who coined the term 'dinosaur'.

This book is written very much as an account of the scientific progress and rivalry of these two men - Mantell the earlier, unheralded discoverer of many of the most significant fossil finds, Owen the man who built on (and in some cases stole, or at the very least heavily plagiarised) Mantell's discoveries to achieve wealth, esteem and scientific recognition for himself. Owen is very much the villain in this book! Other well-known figures from 19th century science make an appearance - Mary Anning, who found the first ichthyosaurus skeleton that began the whole affair; Charles Lyell; Charles Darwin; William Buckland; Georges Cuvier.

It was an interesting read, although not quite the book I was hoping for. Knowing next to nothing about, and with even less interest in, geology, rock strata and scientific classification, I found this a bit tedious on occasion, but the human interest of the narrative kept me reading.]]> 4.16 2000 The Dinosaur Hunters
author: Deborah Cadbury
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2021/06/28
date added: 2024/08/24
shelves: british-history, dinosaurs
review:
I originally picked this book up last year, after visiting Lyme Regis, in the hope of learning more about Mary Anning and her fossil discoveries in Lyme that paved the way for the 'discovery' of the dinosaurs. Sadly, she features very little in this book - it is very much more about the British scientists who first began to examine fossils with a scientific eye, with an attempt to classify them and place them in an historical and geological spectrum.

Obviously fossils had long been scientific curiosities, and in other places around the world giant bones and skeletons had been emerging from the earth for centuries. But it wasn't really until the advent of the science of geology that scientists began to examine what remains of creatures embedded within rock actually meant, what the different layers of rock signified about different eras in history, and how this new fossil record cast doubt on the Biblical explanation of human history. Two British scientists were at the forefront of these discoveries - Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen, the latter being the man who coined the term 'dinosaur'.

This book is written very much as an account of the scientific progress and rivalry of these two men - Mantell the earlier, unheralded discoverer of many of the most significant fossil finds, Owen the man who built on (and in some cases stole, or at the very least heavily plagiarised) Mantell's discoveries to achieve wealth, esteem and scientific recognition for himself. Owen is very much the villain in this book! Other well-known figures from 19th century science make an appearance - Mary Anning, who found the first ichthyosaurus skeleton that began the whole affair; Charles Lyell; Charles Darwin; William Buckland; Georges Cuvier.

It was an interesting read, although not quite the book I was hoping for. Knowing next to nothing about, and with even less interest in, geology, rock strata and scientific classification, I found this a bit tedious on occasion, but the human interest of the narrative kept me reading.
]]> <![CDATA[The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World]]> 35820369 The dinosaurs. Sixty-six million years ago, the Earth’s most fearsome creatures vanished. Today they remain one of our planet’s great mysteries. Now The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs reveals their extraordinary, 200-million-year-long story as never before.

In this captivating narrative (enlivened with more than seventy original illustrations and photographs),Steve Brusatte, a young American paleontologist who has emerged as one of the foremost stars of the field—naming fifteen new species and leading groundbreaking scientific studies and fieldwork—masterfully tells the complete, surprising, and new history of the dinosaurs, drawing on cutting-edge science to dramatically bring to life their lost world and illuminate their enigmatic origins, spectacular flourishing, astonishing diversity, cataclysmic extinction, and startling living legacy. Captivating and revelatory, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a book for the ages.

Brusatte traces the evolution of dinosaurs from their inauspicious start as small shadow dwellers—themselves the beneficiaries of a mass extinction caused by volcanic eruptions at the beginning of the Triassic period—into the dominant array of species every wide-eyed child memorizes today, T. rex, Triceratops, Brontosaurus, and more. This gifted scientist and writer re-creates the dinosaurs� peak during the Jurassic and Cretaceous, when thousands of species thrived, and winged and feathered dinosaurs, the prehistoric ancestors of modern birds, emerged. The story continues to the end of the Cretaceous period, when a giant asteroid or comet struck the planet and nearly every dinosaur species (but not all) died out, in the most extraordinary extinction event in earth’s history, one full of lessons for today as we confront a “sixth extinction.�

Brusatte also recalls compelling stories from his globe-trotting expeditions during one of the most exciting eras in dinosaur research—which he calls “a new golden age of discovery”—and offers thrilling accounts of some of the remarkable findings he and his colleagues have made, including primitive human-sized tyrannosaurs; monstrous carnivores even larger than T. rex; and paradigm-shifting feathered raptors from China.

An electrifying scientific history that unearths the dinosaurs� epic saga, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs will be a definitive and treasured account for decades to come.]]> 404 Steve Brusatte 0062490427 Caroline 4 dinosaurs 4.24 2018 The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
author: Steve Brusatte
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2018/05/05
date added: 2024/08/24
shelves: dinosaurs
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation]]> 202102082 A magnificent history of the 1925 Scopes trial and how the teaching of evolution in public schools exposed profound divisions in America about morals, freedom, censorship, religion, and the meaning of democracy that still resonate todayIn 1925, hundreds of people descended on the sleepy town of Dayton, Tennessee, for the “trial of the century,� where a young schoolteacher named John T. Scopes was charged with teaching evolution to his biology class. Darwin’s theory that species evolved over time through natural selection (misunderstood to suggest that humans descended from monkeys) was viewed as a threat to the nation. Two legendary attorneys, Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, drew massive crowds in a trial that quickly became a circus-like media sensation—but it was much more than that. Darrow was arguing that people should be free to worship, or not to worship, and be free to learn, particularly about science, while Bryan declared that evolution undermined the literal truth of the Bible and created a society without morals, meaning, or hope.Prize-winning historian Brenda Wineapple brings to vivid life the entirety of this dramatic and colorful period that exposed foundational divisions across race, region, and religion. Bryan, three times the Democratic nominee for President, had been Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, and his populism and political ambitions, vividly chronicled in this book, culminated in Dayton. Darrow was the celebrated and successful advocate of labor and a fervent believer in civil rights, as protected by the Constitution. Along with the newly-formed ACLU, he defended Scopes, declaring, “No subject possesses the minds of men like religious bigotry, and hate, and these fires are being lighted today in America.”In Keeping the Faith, Brenda Wineapple illuminates this electrifying, pivotal legal showdown, which at its heart was a struggle over the fundamental values that define America, and in doing so calls attention to a crisis almost a century ago that continues to reverberate in the present.]]> 544 Brenda Wineapple 0593229924 Caroline 4 4.22 2024 Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation
author: Brenda Wineapple
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/20
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World]]> 1027873
Thistlewood's diary, kept over the course of forty years, describes in graphic detail how white rule over slaves was predicated on the infliction of terror on the bodies and minds of slaves. Thistlewood treated his slaves cruelly even while he relied on them for his livelihood. Along with careful notes on sugar production, Thistlewood maintained detailed records of a sexual life that fully expressed the society's rampant sexual exploitation of slaves. In Burnard's hands, Thistlewood's diary reveals a great deal not only about the man and his slaves but also about the structure and enforcement of power, changing understandings of human rights and freedom, and connections among social class, race, and gender, as well as sex and sexuality, in the plantation system.]]> 334 Burnard 0807855251 Caroline 2 3.73 2004 Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World
author: Burnard
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2004
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/18
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Wild Horse Country: The History, Myth, and Future of the Mustang, America's Horse]]> 38212116

In Wild Horse Country, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter David Philipps traces the rich history of wild horses in America and investigates the shocking dilemma they face in our own time.]]> 368 David Philipps 0393356221 Caroline 4 4.27 2017 Wild Horse Country: The History, Myth, and Future of the Mustang, America's Horse
author: David Philipps
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/13
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground]]> 584018
Like the work of Joseph Campbell and Bruce Chatwin, this vital, engrossing book offers a new way to understand the hold that stories and songs have on us, and a new sense of the urgency of doing so. Drawing on his own experience in many fields -- as scholar and storyteller, witness among native peoples and across cultures -- Ted Chamberlin takes us on a journey through the tales of different peoples, from North America to Africa and Jamaica.

Beautifully written, with insight and deep understanding, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? examines why it is now more important than ever to attend to what others are saying in their stories and myths -- and what we are saying about ourselves. Only then will we understand why they have such power over us.]]> 288 J. Edward Chamberlin 0676974929 Caroline 4 3.96 2003 If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground
author: J. Edward Chamberlin
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/11
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves:
review:

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