Joan of Arc: Her Story
by Régine Pernoud
The Oxford History of Byzantium
Buy The Oxford History of Byzantium!
Cyril Mango
Abby is daring
Abby has a copy of The Daring Book for Girls by Miriam Peskowitz (in addition to her copy of The Dangerous Book for Boys). On page 82 she finds “The Daring Girls Guide to Danger” which gives a list of things that any daring girl should do to face her fears and push herself to new heights to inspire her to face challenges throughout her life. Here is the abbreviated list:
- Ride a roller coaster.
- Ride a zip line across the canopy of a rain forest.
- Go white-water rafting.
- Have a scary movie festival in your living room.
- Wear high heels.
- Stand up for yourself-or someone else.
- Try sushi or another exotic food.
- Dye your hair purple.
Abby has always had a strong sense of justice and readily stands up for herself and others. Number 6? Check.
Abby has a pair of high heel brown boots that were handed down to her from Chelsea. She readily wears these to everywhere but school. Maybe they don’t fit her school image, or more likely they aren’t practical for what I understand are very active recesses. Number 5? In progress.
Tonight Abby dyed her hair cherry red, her favorite color. She asked for this as soon as she read it in this book. Aside from it being a little costly, I honestly didn’t have any good reason to not do it. We went to my stylist and she used a food-grade dye for safety. It is absolutely darling. Number 8? Check.
Everyone should have such a list. Abby is lucky to have found it, and I think it is only a matter of time before she starts adding her own things to the list to personalize it to her own needs and goals.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
English gentleman magician Dr. Norrell and his pupil Jonathan Strange work to help England defeat Napolean and return magic to England, with unexpected results. Susanna Clarke’s historical fantasy fiction novel is nearly as long as ‘The Lord of the Rings’, but her version of a magical 19th century Britain is so compelling and her writing so smooth and consistent in style and tone that you’ll be sorry when it’s over.
Buy ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell’!
The Story of My Life (by Helen Keller)
Buy ‘The Story of My Life’ by Helen Keller!
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Buy Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows!
The Catcher Was a Spy
Moe Berg was an attorney, a star college shortstop, a major league catcher, a spy for the United States during the second world war, and a professional vagabond intellectual. If this story were not true, it would be bad fiction!
I’d seen this title on B. Dalton’s sports shelf many times but never picked it up until a co-worker mentioned that he attended a World Series game (1968? I don’t remember) as Moe Berg’s guest. Don’t you wait for a colleague to reveal their connection to the spy catcher, buy it today and read it immediately.
Buy The Catcher Was a Spy!
Flags of our Fathers
We still haven’t seen the film (52 of 452 holds on 80 copies!), but I can’t imagine it being more powerful than the book.
Paris 1919
A cleany-written survey of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that non-historians can enjoy. This book is not a study of the treaty itself. Instead, Margaret Macmillan covers the peace conference in Paris by focusing on the interaction of the major actors, mostly Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau, as they try their best to craft an agreement they hope will shape a new order of democracy and peace.
War in the middle east, 1930s fascism, genocide in Europe, Africa, and the Balkans are all sad evidence that the peace makers’ vision of a peaceful, democratic world shaped by self-determination of nations is yet to come to pass, but this book reminds me that neither the treaty itself nor the peacemakers who drafted are entirely to blame. They did make colossal blunders, such as their clumsy structuring of mid-east national boundaries, but they were working in the political framework of the time and negotiated the best document they could.
There isn’t a lot of scholarly analysis in this book until the final “Conclusion” chapter, but Macmillan writes of Wilson, George, and Clemenceau:
If they could have done better, they certainly could have done much worse. They tried . . . to build a better order. They could not foresee the future and they certainly could not control it. That was up to their successors.
That sounds about right to me. Yes, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles contributed to the economic conditions that made violent nationalism possible in Europe and drew up borders that have kept the Middle East largely unstable, but the world’s current leaders and citizens are as much to blame for our condition.
Macmillan continues:
When war came in 1939, it was a result of twenty years of decisions taken or not taken, not of arrangements made in 1919.
The same is true for our predicament today.
