Reading Still Matters

I recently completed The Eagle and the Hart by Helen Castor.  I read it as part of my Quarter 2 Historathon reads (tbat's a YouTube thing). Castor's book is all about the life stories of Richard of Bordeaux (Richard II) and Henry of Bolingbroke (Henry the IV).  The two men were cousins, but never close. Richard was brave but no soldier and Henry was the standard of medieval of chivalry.  Conflict was inevitable... well, at least in hindsight.  Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4vHbxGQ     In fact,  Richard wasn't a great king and he became increasingly paranoid over time. Near the end, he maintained the throne by keeping the nobles in a state of permanent fear using a number of methods that actually seem pretty modern in terms of their psychological impact. For example, Richard required the lords to provide general statements of guilt that were to be reviewed by a special commission. What if you made a general admission of guilt? How would it be ...

One of my favourite subjects to read about is adventure at sea, from shipwrecks, treasure hunts to voyages of discovery.  I am from the prairies of Canada, so the ocean is always fascinating.  And so Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire by Julian Sancton was exactly the kind of book I like to pick up.  Neptune’s Fortune is a non-fiction page turner that tells the story of Roger Dooley’s a 30-year obsession to find the San José. Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4vHbxGQ The San Jose was a Spanish galleon that sunk in 1708 off the coast of Colombia near its destination port of Cartagena. And it was loaded with a massive treasure of silver and gold extracted from the mines and people of south America by force. The San Jose was that Spanish treasure ship that every explorer wanted to find. Basically, this ship was the holy grail of treasure ships.   Rumored to be full of gold and silver at the time it sailed, the ...

I was recently in the United States and dropped into Barnes & Noble to pick up a book (I am Canadian). Turns out that I grabbed The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire by Tore Skeie. I am not going to lie, I mean I think Vikings are pretty cool, but really I was attracted to the book by the cover and the crazy good title.  A thoughtful package to a book can open covers so to speak, even if a book can't be judged by its cover. Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/3RNMXpb When I started reading it, I was surprised to learn that Tore Skeie is a Norwegian historian and that the book was translated from the Norwegian language. The Wolf Age (originally published in Norway as Hvitekrist ) is his first major work to be translated into English and it really does have a Scandinavian centered perspective, so it was very cool.  For the most part, books on Norse history I have read have been from the English perspective. The Wolf Ag...

So I just completed my second Erik Larson book - the first being Dead Wake . And honestly, I was pretty excited to read Devil in the White City because I did enjoy Dead Wake quite a lot, and I had heard a number of good things about Devil in the White City . The questions for me were whether I would like Devil in the White City and whether I am going to enjoy reading all of Larson's book. My logic is simple - if I enjoy the first two books of his that I read then I am going to enjoy them all.  Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4eaoOjV So Devil in the White City was an excellent work, I really enjoy his compelling but clean writing style. He is often compared to novelists, and I think that's fair. What he really does well is put the reader in the shoes of the people he is writing about. Now, the fact that he does this well may not be something everyone likes. For those history purists who don't like the liberties of imagination that are necessary to write this way may...

I recently completed Poland: A History by Adam Zamoyski which had been sitting on my bookshelf for a while now. The title should give you a pretty good hint at what this one is about, basically it’s an overview of the history of the Polish people and Polish state from around the tenth century up to the end of the Lech Walesa period following the Soviet collapse.      And for those of you who have been reading Polish history for a while now, this might be a book you have come across before in a different guise. Zamoysky originally published this back in 1987 as The Polish Way , although this is a revised and updated edition which re-evaluates Poland’s past with a "fresh eye." Basically, we have a general extension of the time covered as the book now includes more about post-Soviet developments. So, if you have already read The Polish Way , then be forewarned. I haven’t read The Polish Way, so I am not sure how different it actually is. Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn...