I don’t know how I found this book, but somehow while freezing on the train platform in Tokyo on New Year’s morning, I located this little gem. I started to read it on my phone, as I stood huddled in a train car trying to not get elbowed by too many hungover locals on their way to see family. I’m told by a coworker that it’s a tradition in Japan. First you get hammered on New Year’s Eve and then travel to see your family […]
An illuminating book about the grossness of human behavior.
I went into this expecting the corruption, murder, institutional racism, etc. against the Osage Indians to be very bad, and I still somehow managed to come out of this book mindboggled. This book should be taught in schools, and it is heinous that these terrible things happened, and just as heinous that so many people covered it up, and practically erased it from history. In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the US were the Osage. By sheer coincidence, after their tribe was […]
Don’t fret these books are a couple of gems
Biographies are interesting. I figure the author most likely likes the subject, or why write about it? However, lately it seems the same few people are being written: Lincoln, Hamilton, Sonia Sotomayor and Amelia Earhart. Now, this is great. I enjoy learning about them as much as the next person. But how many times can you read about them? Therefore, when someone not as popular or new comes along, I am on it. The Diamond and the Boy: The Creation of Diamonds & The Life […]
the last of God’s children in a godless world
New Jerusalem is a non-fiction book covering the history of a militant and apocalyptic breakaway Christian sect in the early Reformation. The Melchiorites, named after their founding preacher, were early Anabaptists. A radical offshoot of Lutheranism, the Anabaptists were viewed as heretics by mainstream Catholics and suffered significant persecution. The Melchiorites sought sanctuary in the Lutheran-friendly city of a Munster. A small group of influential men put out a call for the poor to come to Munster for rebaptism as Melchiorites. More appealingly, they also promised […]