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Currently ReadingRecently Read | Although I’ve only read three books this year, my early effort at spontaneity over planning in my reading selections means two of those books were biographies of two women at about the same time. They resulted in impressions as different as the subjects. On the disappointing end of the spectrum was Eva Braun: Life with [...]            Tim January 12th, 2012 | Tags: biography, Book Reviews, history, nonfiction | Category: Book Reviews | Leave a comment |  Print This Post |  Email This PostEarly into reading Anna Funder’s Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, I came across a passage that made me think, “That is truly Kafkaesque.” For some reason, that sent my mind on a digression into the difference between something being Kafkaesque and something being Orwellian. While I eventually sorted it out in my own [...] Tim November 14th, 2011 | Tags: Book Reviews, Germany, history, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | One comment - (Comments are closed) | Print This Post | Email This PostThe main ramifications of historic events are frequently easy to see. Often, though, we overlook the ripples that produce unexpected, or even untended, effects. Take 9/11, for example. It didn’t take a great deal of thought to realize it would bring the U.S. into direct armed conflict with al-Qaeda. And it was barely six weeks [...] Tim October 28th, 2011 | Tags: 9/11, Book Reviews, history, Iraq War, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostWorld War II is often seen as the last “good war,” a clear-cut conflict between good and evil. And there was plenty of evil to go around, not just in the Axis forces. Take, for example, the case of Marcel Petiot. Petiot, a French physician, was convicted of murdering 26 people in Paris during World [...] Tim September 16th, 2011 | Tags: Book Reviews, history, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostWhy do certain political ideas take root and gain acceptance while others advocated by the same party or movement do not? That question can’t help but come to mind reading R. Alton Lee’s Principle over Party: The Farmers’ Alliance and Populism in South Dakota, 1880-1900. The Farmers’ Alliance and the political parties to which it [...] Tim August 19th, 2011 | Tags: Book Reviews, history, nonfiction, Review Copy, South Dakota history | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostThe War to End All Wars didn’t. At least in the United States, the vast majority of those alive today probably view World War I as the chapter in their history textbook before the Depression and World War II. And the death earlier this year of the last surviving combat veteran of the Great War [...] Tim August 9th, 2011 | Tags: Book Reviews, history, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostIt sticks out on almost any bookshelf. Like the cover, a white circle appears in the center of the jacket spine, the antithesis of the black that otherwise fills the space. In the midst of the circle is black again, but in the shape of the Nazi swastika. The title, The Rise and Fall of [...] Tim August 8th, 2011 | Tags: biography, Book Reviews, history, Nazi Germany, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This Post2010 was a record year in one respect. I read more books this year than in any one year since I started keeping a book diary in 1976. This year’s total was 127, quite a bit higher than the 111 from last year, the previous record. I attribute the number to 2010 being the first [...] Tim January 3rd, 2011 | Tags: bibliolust, biography, Books, ebooks, fiction, history, nonfiction, Nook, poetry, reading | Category: A Reading Life | One comment - (Comments are closed) | Print This Post | Email This PostGood fortune — luck — manifests itself in a variety of ways. Frequently, just how lucky we are comes only with hindsight and even then we may not realize just what contributed to a serendipitous result. Yet the extent of a person’s fortune may well be a matter of perspective, much like the adage about [...] Tim November 16th, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, history, memoir, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostWhether cast in terms of manifest destiny or, more crudely, “the Indian problem,” at its core the conflict between white and Native Americans was a clash of cultures. While not necessarily the centerpiece, Dakota Territory was frequently a stage upon which it played out. Despite the fact it focuses on a narrow slice of the [...] Tim November 1st, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, history, nonfiction, Review Copy, South Dakota history | Category: Book Reviews | One comment - (Comments are closed) | Print This Post | Email This Post |       The views expressed here are mine and mine alone. I do not speak for my law partners, our associates, staff and clients or my family and friends. Not only should any opinions here not be attributed to them, chances are they probably don't agree with me.  | ||
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