by envisionmg | Aug 14, 2015 | History, Jim Reviews
by Jim Abulafia’s The Great Sea has been on my bedside table for what seems like years. Actually it has been years. It is just exactly what it says it is a history of the Mediterranean from prehistory to 2010. The thing that has been stopping me is that, minus...
by envisionmg | Jun 12, 2015 | History, Jim Reviews
By Jim When I first saw Michael Pye’s The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe I though “huh I don’t really know anything about life around the medieval North Sea.” And that’s kind of...
by envisionmg | May 18, 2015 | History, Jim Reviews
By Jim Now that we are through the first year of the hundred year anniversary of World War 1 I thought it would be interesting to read a history of that first year of the war. So I picked up Peter Hart’s Fire and Movement: The British Expeditionary Force and the...
by envisionmg | Apr 27, 2015 | History, Jim Reviews, YA
by Jim The obvious hook of Georg Rauch’s memoir Unlikely Warrior: A Jewish Soldier in Hitler’s Army is how did a Jew end up in the German army in World War II? Until I read this book I would have thought it was impossible, but apparently it was a thing...
by envisionmg | Apr 10, 2015 | Historical Fiction, History, Non-fiction
If you are like most fans of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall series you’ve been climbing the walls waiting for PBS to release the BBC miniseries (which they’ve been watching in England for months the lucky devils). But there’s a problem you can only...
by envisionmg | Apr 1, 2015 | Fiction, Historical Fiction, History, Non-fiction, Reading Lists
May 7 will be the 100 anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania (see Chris’s review of Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy and the End of the Edwardian Age) by German U-20 off the Irish coast. Like a lot of anniversaries of major historical events this one has spawned...