Last review of the year, here we go. Not counting the epilogue, this book runs 227 pages. The first and last 50 pages contain some genuine bad-ass librarianism. The middle 100 pages are the political history of the region, which is relevant and good info to know, but seems to be a separate narrative (non-fictional, but still a different story). If you title a book The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, most of the book should be about that. This is the problem with the book. […]
I shouldn’t know more than our culture’s leading experts…
While reading this, I found myself questioning beliefs I have held for many years. Not because this book presents novel ideas or is deeply informative about a subject I mistakenly thought I was familiar with (though it did represent what are to me novel ideas, and I am not overly familiar with this subject), but because its author’s views occupy the same space as mine, and he has fallen not only into controversy, but disfavor. Which, of course, makes me question how I see the […]
A 200 year old forgotten war that inspired more thought than I’d expected.
This is a fairly difficult book for me to review, because I quite enjoyed it but have some serious complaints about not only its content, but the views of its author. The book itself is well researched, and the subject was interesting, being an area and an era with which I’m fairly unfamiliar. The time between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the antebellum years, has always been a bit out of reach for me. I can never really remember which president served at […]
To stare into the abyss and see a vacant soul
Objective Troy (2015) Not previously reviewed for CBR. On September 30, 2011, the US assassinated Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Kahn in Al Jawf, Yemen. Both men were American citizens, though only Awlaki had been targeted by the US government. Two weeks later, Awlaki’s 16-year old son, Abdulraman al-Awlaki, was also killed in a drone strike in Yemen, though he wasn’t specifically targeted. He, Awlaki, came to national prominence as a “moderate voice” of Islam following the devastation of 9/11, giving numerous interviews to the media; […]