All the Tibetans wanted was to be left alone, to practice their ancient religion and live the feudal lives they had always lived. They were isolated, hemmed in by some of the world’s highest mountains, protected by tribes of bandits. It should have been easy for them to live in peace. But for more than a century [...]
Archive for the ‘History’ Category
Trespassers on the Roof of the World
Posted in History, Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on November 10, 2009 | 5 Comments »
War and Peace
Posted in Classics, Fiction, Historical Fiction, History on September 3, 2009 | 10 Comments »
Wow. I see I have been absent from Shelf Love for nearly three weeks. That time has included a vacation to Chicago (with Teresa!) and the very busy start of my school year, but mostly I have been entirely absorbed in completing my Summer of Long Classics by reading Leo Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace.
War and [...]
The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World
Posted in History, Nonfiction, tagged Review Copy on July 29, 2009 | 8 Comments »
A few years after William Shakespeare’s death, his business partners, actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, approached the printer William Jaggard with a proposal that he publish a complete collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Some of Shakespeare’s plays had been printed individually in small editions called quartos, but Jaggard elected to print this collection in the larger folio format, and in [...]
Opening Skinner’s Box
Posted in History, Nonfiction on July 14, 2009 | 7 Comments »
Lauren Slater, who is a psychologist herself, introduces Opening Skinner’s Box by explaining that her desire in writing the book was twofold. First, she wanted to take the great psychological experiments of this century out of their dry lab reports, out of the bar graphs and jargon, and put them into the narrative form that [...]
Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu
Posted in Biography, History, Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on February 28, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Marco Polo, a history of that well-traveled Venetian gentleman by Laurence Bergreen, is simultaneously one of the most interesting and one of the most irritating books I’ve read in a long time. During the whole course of reading it, I couldn’t decide whether I most wanted to find out what happened next, or throw the [...]
Résistance
Posted in History, Memoir, Nonfiction on January 24, 2009 | 12 Comments »
In June 1940, the unthinkable happened: German troops invaded Paris. No one was truly prepared for the panic and the evacuation that followed. French soldiers watched, helpless, as families streamed from the City of Light to the countryside, carrying children and a few possessions in their arms, under fire from aircraft. Total defeat seemed inevitable: [...]
The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty
Posted in History, Nonfiction on December 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
What do you think of when you hear the name William Bligh? A hot-tempered tyrant ready to punish the men of his ship for the slightest offense? When you hear of the mutiny on the Bounty, do you imagine a group of young romantics trying to break free from a dictatorial rule to live freely [...]
Black Like Me
Posted in History, Memoir, Nonfiction on December 15, 2008 | 4 Comments »
In 1959, John Howard Griffin, a white reporter for Sepia Magazine, took medication that darkened his skin to a deep brown. Starting in New Orleans, he traveled for a month through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, passing as a black man. Black Like Me, whose title comes from the last lines of a poem by [...]
Everybody Was So Young
Posted in Biography, History, Nonfiction on December 12, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Imagine that you’re at a party. It’s the best sort of party: plentiful food, lots of delicious drinks, and all of your best friends being particularly clever and witty, making music, dancing, drawing on napkins to explain their points. Lights twinkle in the garden, and the breeze is warm in the trees; the children are [...]
The Ice Master
Posted in History, Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on November 7, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while know that I am something of an Arctic and Antarctic literature obsessive. I have by no means read everything there is to read on the subject, but I’ve done quite a bit of armchair exploration. To my mind, there’s rarely anything so much fun [...]
