Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club That Sparked Modern Feminism When I was working my history degree way back in the mists of time I took a class on the history of feminism. The class was very interesting and at one point the professor made a glancing reference to an organization in Greenwich…
30I have always loved birds of prey: hawks, falcons or eagles. Whether it was as child watching Red Tailed Hawks circle in the thermals over my grandfather’s farm or a cooper’s hawk crashing through the hedges of my backyard trying to chase down it’s next meal, I have been obsessed with the intensity and focus…
The Irish Assassins by Julie Kavanagh One sunlit evening, May 6 l882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed and stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were funded by American supporters of Irish independence and carried out by the Invincibles, a militant…
Some of the books that I have setting on my nightstand waiting to be read The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo the Transformation of Western Civilization by Paul Strathern Between the birth of Dante in 1265 and the death of Galileo in 1642, something happened that transformed the entire culture of western civilization. Painting, sculpture,…
The Voyagers. The islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia stretch across a huge expanse of ocean and encompass a multitude of different peoples. Starting with Captain James Cook, the earliest European explorers to visit the Pacific were astounded and perplexed to find populations thriving thousands of miles from continents. Who were these people? From where…
I stumbled on this series when I was reading Seeking Truths Through: Historians on Writing Historical Genre Fiction in Perspectives On History. Laury Silvers is a scholar in the medieval Islamic world. She had moved from academia to writing historical fiction because it was one of the only ways to get at the lives of…
As you might expect from a librarian I am fascinated by how books are made throughout history and recently I have been reading a lot about how they were produced in the middle ages before the invention of the printing press. This is an off shoot of my last recommendation The Bookseller of Florence which…
For my morning and evening commutes I’ve been listening to The Bookseller of Florence. I haven’t quite finished it so I don’t feel comfortable reviewing it. However, I’ve really been enjoying it so I totally recommend it. It’s available on Hoopla, Overdrive or in hardcopy. What I really love about it is its mix of…
Current events have reminded me that like many white Americans I am sadly lacking in my knowledge of African History. Over the course of the pandemic I’ve put together an African history reading list that I have been slowly working my way through. This is only the beginning of the list which focuses mostly on…
Like many people stuck at home with some spare time on my hands I’ve been reading more. For most of that time I have been binge reading/listening/looking at the Rivers of London Series. Its technically called the Peter Grant Series but I think Rivers of London sounds cooler. It consists of eight novels, two novellas…
The library may be closed but our elibrary is open 24/7 with ebooks, audiobooks, movies, music and more. But today I’m going to be recommending ebooks and audiobooks you can have right now from our Hoopla service. The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley. Audiobook I was first exposed to Buckley’s quirky style when I read…
I normally wait to finish reading a book before I start righting about it on Read This but I have been enjoying Pekka Hämäläinen’s Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power so much I needed to stop halfway through and recommend it to you all. As Hämäläinen points out in his introduction, one of…
Over the summer I did a deep dive into research on the Italian Renaissance focusing on business, government and warfare. Two caveats before I get started though: 1) Several of these books will be hard to find unless you use our ILL Department. They are small print runs from academic presses so they are usually…
I just recently discovered (and by discovered I mean a friend told me about them) the author Crystal King who writes cooking based historical fiction. Given that food and historical fiction are two of my favorite things I can’t wait to start these books. Also the covers are gorgeous. Feast of Sorrow: A Novel of…
It is that time of year when I take a long vacation (i.e. for the rest of the year). This year I thought I would give you a list of books I’m planning on reading. The key part of that last sentence was “planning.” This list is entirely aspirational and many if not most will…
Anyone who knows me knows that I love food (I also like fancy hotels, but I can rarely afford to stay in them). All kinds of food from seven course French feasts to stuffing my face with hush puppies and soda. There very few things I won’t eat (I’m looking at you cranberries). I can…
Jeffery Cox’s Morning Star, Midnight Sun is what I tend to think of as a “learning curve” study. A campaign, in this case the Guadalcanal campaign, or a theater of operations is presented to the reader as a bit of a shambles and then we watch as the participants slowly work out how to fight…
Genre Blending (also called Genre Crossing, Genre Mixing, Cross-Genre) is when an author mixes together aspects of two or more genre styles in the same work. In this case Historical Fiction, SciFi or Fantasy. That’s my rather simplistic definition of Genre Blending. I can’t decide if there have been more of these books coming out…
I fell down a bit of a Holy Roman Empire reading rabbit hole (as one does). It started with an obligatory read of a Martin Luther biography and went from there. Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet by Lyndal Roper. Ok technically I’ve already read this book. This was the pick for the November History Book…
As anyone knows who frequents this blog I love reading all things spy related. But I have a particular soft spot for Elizabethan espionage. So here are some fiction and non-fiction titles that I have either read or am looking forward to reading. Fiction A Column of Fire by Ken Follett. In 1558, the ancient…
A Single Spy by William Christie. This book was inspired by my reading of Legacy of Spies. Set during World War II rather than the Cold War and Russians vs Germans rather than Russians/Germans vs English, it is a very different book from Legacy of Spies but very in enjoyable. Aleksi Ivanovich Smirnov, an orphan…
I can actually remember the first time I heard about the Battle of Crete, albeit obliquely. I was a kid watching the old 60s Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn movie Guns of Navarone. Peck’s character Mallory’s major credential as a special operations soldier is the fact that he is a mountaineer and survived…
For this Saint Patrick’s Day we thought we’d offer up some histories of Ireland that show Ireland’s interacation with the outside world throughout history. Also these titles might be a little less well known. Enjoy! Ireland in the Virginian sea : colonialism in the British Atlantic by Audrey Horning. In the late sixteenth century,…
Getting tired of the interminable wait for Rogue One to be released? Yeah me too. Here are some tie in books (some more so than others) to help get you through. Ahsoka I’m not normally a fan of books that are all Jedi all the time. I’ve always found the stories of non-force users in…
I have this fear (some might say pathological fear) of going somewhere and not having something to read. With libraries, bookstores, and of course ebooks that really isn’t a problem. However, I went on vacation last week, and that brought about a further problem I have: over packing books. Picture me standing in my bedroom…
Once again my bedside table has gotten so full of books that my eyeglasses case and alarm clock are threatening to move to some other bedside table. Lets see what’s on there. 1916: A Global History by Keith Jeffery When I picked up this book originally I thought, “oh goodie, another World War I book,”…
Doing a Russian spy themed Jim Recommends today. All of the books I’m recomeneding are perspective on Cold War espionage from the persective of the Soviet Union.
This is easily my favorite work by Umberto Eco and pretty high on my list of favorite works of historical fiction in general. The story is set in the late 12th century and early 13th century. The main character is Baudolino a boy from northern Italy who has two talents: he can learn any language in moments and he is a very good liar.
The Medici have been getting a lot of notoriety lately, both in fiction (for example The Medici Boy by John L’Heureux, and a whole slew of novels featuring Catherine De Medici) and in television (most notably Da Vinci’s Demons). The House of Medici, although an older book, is great for people who want some background on the Medici clan without getting bogged down in the Renaissance artists they patronized…