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A Postcard-perfect Empire
I read this as the 4th of ten for the Orbis Terrarum 2009 Challenge. Emperor of China: Self-portrait of K'ang-hsi is an early work by the distinguished Yale scholar Jonathan Spence, who since this 1974 book has written … -
Splendid Little Wars
A common misperception is that Queen Victoria’s reign was marked by a Great Peace between the Peninsular War (1808 – 1814) and the Second Boer War (1899 – 1902). Not so, is Byron Farwell’s thesis in Queen Victoria's Litt… -
Deliver Us from Fervent, Narrow, Dogmatic Minds
Dmitri Volkogonov (1928 – 1995) was the former director of the Soviet Institute of Military History. In that job during the 1980s, he had access to secret Soviet archives. He wrote biographies of the major trio, Lenin, T… -
From the Confederate High Point
Confederates by Australian writer Thomas Keneally is a realistic novel of the American Civil War. It made the short list for the prestigious Booker Prize in 1979. It follows a unit of the Confederate army commanded by G… -
Changes in the Fortunes of the Innocent
Wisconsin Death Trip (Michael Lesy) is one of oddest books alive. It is a combination of old photographs and news stories of Wisconsin country life in the late 19th century. The photos were taken by Charley Van Schaick, … -
He had the Evil Eyes of a Wolf
Lenin in Zurich (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1977) provides psychological insight into Lenin’s wolf-like character. Solzhenitsyn’s attempt at a portrait paints Lenin as hot-tempered, dogmatic, and bitterly contemptuous of th… -
Feats of Clay
In Eminent Victorians Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) takes down the heroes Florence Nightingale, Henry Cardinal Manning, Thomas Arnold and Gen. Charles Gordon. Among the first experiments in modern snark, it became a best-s… -
Social History of Women in the Wild West
Dee Brown was most famous as the author of Buried My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971), a heart-breaking account of the wars against American Indian nations in the latter half of the 19th century. However, he also wrote many … -
Greek-speaking Empire
In his November 2000 obit, The Times said, “Steven Runciman was famous for throwing light on some very dark ages, and attempting, as he said the historian must, ‘to record in one great sweeping sequence the greater ev… -
Traveling the 19th-c. American Interior
M. H. Dunlop, an English prof at Iowa State University, read the travel books of 300 foreign and domestic travelers to the American Midwest in order to write Sixty Miles from Contentment: Traveling the Nineteenth-Century…
buffaloSavage
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- Name: Matt
- Birthday: 6/20/1956
- Gender: Male
- Member Since: 3/10/2004
Recent Weblogs
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Let's Talk about Procrastination Later
Mon (The Gate) is the last novel in Natsume Soseki... -
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
At the start of the Great Beastly Cultural Revolut... -
History of Ideas
In Savage Reprisals: Bleak House, Madame Bovary, ...
