pickFascinating look at Chicago before the fire (1871) through the life of a woman whose family played an important role in the city‘s early history. It‘s all the more interesting because instead of focusing on the speculators, industrialists, & merchant kings who drove much of the city‘s growth, you see the roll women played in shaping society & the city. Keating‘s biography of this flawed but interesting woman is excellent.
My building has a bookcase to share books. Our own little free library. I took a couple down and found these two.
“They‘ll see how beautiful I am and be ashamed. I to am America.”
-Langston Hughes
pickDunbar discovered an advert in the archives from Pres. George Washington, offering a reward for the return of a fugitive enslaved woman - a woman whose testimony would decades later be taken down in two abolitionist newspapers. Between research on Ona and the experiences of other enslaved people, Dunbar rebuilds a biography around a young woman to root for - and again smashes the persistent lie of the good slave owner.
pickA difficult book to review. It‘s part history, philosophy, religious study, sociology, memoir, literary study…it meanders (appropriately so) through how we walk to why we walk to where we walk. It‘s fascinating but slow going (again, appropriately so). It touches on some of Solnit‘s more recent writing but is very different. I would recommend this book, but reservedly. The section near the end, about Las Vegas, is startlingly out of (cont)
pickI learned a lot about what our Marines endured during the Korean War from this book.
pickThis well researched book lays the claim that the Native Americans held their own for centuries as the Europeans tried to colonize North America. It‘s informative and moves from empire to empire and century to century. I found the history of different nations really interesting, but there‘s parts that feel like I was reading about war after war after war. Great for history buffs.
This has been pretty interesting so far. At the minute it is going through some of the events, such as victims, timings, hunts, times that people got away etc. but I am most looking forward to the theories section 😂
I am also looking forward to finding out more about the Serbian vampire and German Werewolf mentioned above!
I was excited to see this book for 99p although I‘m a bit disappointed it means I won‘t have the physical copy on my bookshelf, I love the cover 🍑
