Reading Still Matters

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos is a 2014 non-fiction book exploring China's rapid transformation into an economic superpower, focusing on the tension between individual aspirations and authoritarian control. Based on eight years of reporting for The New Yorker, Osnos highlights how the chase for money, truth, and faith shapes modern Chinese life. Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4ogRxbr I took me a little while to get into this one, but that’s pretty typical for me when starting a new read.   The thing that is different about this one is that it’s written and presented anecdotally through the stories of a number of different individuals acquainted with Osnos.  And I am not really used to a book on contemporary issues that is presented in that kind of style.  Regardless, each of the individual’s stories represents something of the paradigm shift in China as the country moved beyond the period of Maoist totalita...

The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943 by James Holland is a gripping account of the Allied invasion of mainland Italy from the beach landings near Messina and Salerno. The campaign in Italy was meant to be short and low risk, but it turned out to be anything but.  Between September and December 1943, the Allied powers and the Germans engaged in brutal combat that essentially stalled at the Gustav Line south of Rome.  Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4xk5YQ3      Savage Storm is the first book by James Holland that I have read and so I was pretty excited to read it and get a sense of what Holland is all about. I chose Savage Storm because Canada did play a pretty significant role in the fighting and so I wanted to read up on that aspect of the history as well. I am Canadian after all.       And I really enjoyed Savage Storm . Unlike any military history books I have read, Holland used the journals of combatants from both sides t...