In Savannah we spent a short while in The Book Lady Bookstore and I picked up a copy of Tania (which the cover then informs us was "first published as Titania"), Parmenia Migel's kinda weird biography of Isak Dinesen, otherwise known as Baroness Karen Blixen.
   An aside about the bookstore: it's a treasure. We came out of it with only five ( Read more... )

         Catherine the Great is Robert K. Massie's most recent historical account, in a distinguished line of biographies and narrative histories. The subtitle, Portrait of a Woman, hints at the somewhat-more-gossipy nature of this volume, compared to his other works. It is, nonetheless, a fascinating window into the life of the courts of the 18th ( Read more... )

         I'm beginning to consider having a shelf devoted to Fruit Loop Books from the 1800s, and on it would have to be Life of the Empress Josephine, by Cecil B. Hartley (though his name isn't listed in this 1870 Porter & Coates edition). Also on the shelf would be Ignatius Donnelly's Ragnarök, the Age of Fire and Gravel, Captain Willard Glazier ( Read more... )

          I finished Personal and Military History of Philip Kearny, Major-General United States Volunteers, by John Watts De Peyster yesterday, and it has been my ten-pages-a-day quota book for several weeks. Frankly, I don't think I could have tolerated reading it any faster. It's a pretty badly written book.
          Why did I read it, then, you ( Read more... )

The 23rd completed title of the year is Soul of the Lion, a biography of General Joshua L. Chamberlain, by Willard M. Wallace. Chamberlain was an officer in the Civil War (first attached to the 20th Maine), and later Governor of Maine.  He is most famous for his brilliant defense of the extreme left flank of the Union Army during the second day ( Read more... )

My 70th completed book for the year is Janwillem van de Wetering's biography of fellow mystery writer Robert van Gulik: His Life His Work.  As a biography it's rather thin, 149 pages, and a number of those pages are tables.

Van Gulik is most widely known as the author of the Judge Dee mystery stories, based on a 7th century ( Read more... )