Let me start out by saying that I love Sarah Vowell's work and this book has not changed that.  Unfamiliar Fishes is a look at Hawaii's history roughly from the first meeting with haoles [whites] until the de-throning of Hawaii's last monarch and what is essentially their gang pressing into the Union.

Vowell's interest in Hawaiian history was ( Read more... )

I've finished Joan Didion's Where I Was From and, altho this isn't my favorite of Didion's various memoirs, I did find it very engaging both from the excellence of Didion's writing and because I am also a native Californian, tho not one of such a long linage as Didion -- I'm merely a first generation native.

In this book, Didion explores both her ( Read more... )

A very chewy but nevertheless enjoyable and easily read book.  Using the metaphor of Descartes' skull being separated from the rest of his skeleton shortly after death (it isn't absolutely certain, but there's strong evidence one of the guards put on Descartes' corpse to safeguard it during its disinterment in Sweden until its re-internment in ( Read more... )

From Descartes' Bones comes another example an old philosophical problem that dogs us to this day: the debate over whether mind and brain are one entity or two.  Generally the religious hold for two, the non-religious for one, altho Descartes', a devout Catholic, was the first to put forward the materialist (now days called physicalist) belief that ( Read more... )

I have to admit it, I found this story more interesting than its prequel, The Wolves of Andover -- perhaps because the protagonist was much more appealing, perhaps because there was no romance involved (I get grumpier as I get older), and perhaps because the trial sections reminded me so vividly of the McMartin day care "devil worship" hysteria of ( Read more... )

This book is, in fact, the prequel to the Kent book I'm reading now, The Heretic's Daughter, so it was just my luck I started these out of order.

Both books are fictionalized accounts the life and death of Martha Allen Carrier, burned as a witch back in the bad old days of Salem, MA.  (Fun fact: Kent is a descendant of Carrier.)

The Wolves of ( Read more... )

By Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.  Got thru this book in a few days so no question it's a very readable and enjoyable story.  Also, it's written in the epistolary style which is my absolute favorite -- I love reading other peoples' mail and this is the only way to legally do it.  The story takes place a year after the end of WWII, when a young ( Read more... )

I picked this up a year or so ago after seeing the movie that was based on it, the subject matter perked up enormously by the use of Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes as the Duchess and Duke.  For anyone interested in lush, historical dramas I can recommend it.  For anyone interested in a glimpse of Fiennes mostly naked, I can recommend it.  As for ( Read more... )

After swearing off North and South, I went back to it -- sort of.  Since I couldn't shake the feeling I hadn't given it enough of a chance I decided to skip read thru the book (which is basically what some people pay hundreds of dollars to learn when it's called "speed reading".  suckers.) and see if the writing continued tedious throughout.  It ( Read more... )

I rather enjoyed this book, but not enough to keep it.  I kept tripping over modern phrases (at one point "today is the first day of the rest of our lives" was used!) that just put me off.  And it's hard to know how much of the novelization of a real person's life is based on research and how much is creative license, which was guaranteed to drive ( Read more... )