The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson
What was it Stalin once said? A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic? Dates too, in the sea of history, can shed their essence and become empty numbers in the expanse of time. I thought a lot about this as I read Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile, an […]
Land of Tears by Robert Harms
In Land of Tears, Yale historian Robert Harms ties together the Arabian, French, and Belgian “opening” of the Congo River in the interior of Africa in the late 19th-century. Historians have previously studied the Belgian, French, and Arabic settlements as individual, independent entities. Harms argues, however, that these settlements were more reliant on and reactive […]
Review: “The End Is Always Near” by Dan Carlin
What if I told you that someone walking the earth in present day Manhattan in the year 2200 had no idea there once a place named New York City? Imagine they had no idea of a place called America. What kind of apocalyptic thoughts race through your head? Surely, you could envision doomsday scenarios of […]
Review: Michael Schmidt’s Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem
LET’S start with a confession: I am a historian and I have never read Gilgamesh. I didn’t read it in graduate school. I didn’t read it in college. I didn’t even read an excerpt in high school. I am a Gilgamesh virgin. But, perhaps this apparent lapse in my education was all for the best […]