Reading:
Mark Benyon - London's Curse: Murder, Black Magic, and Tutankhamun in the 1920s West End: Sadly, while there are some interesting facts about the mania for things Egyptian that the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb engendered in London and a not-too-bad biography of Aleister Crowley, overall this book has descended into superstitious ( Read more... )

Reading:
Mark Benyon - London's Curse: Murder, Black Magic, and Tutankhamun in the 1920s West End: I'm only a quarter of the way through the book, but so far it's turning into an interesting survey of the vogue for occultism in London between the world wars. The only disappointment is that Benyon writes as if the curse of Tutankhamun were an ( Read more... )

Reading:
Daniel O'Krent - Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. This is an excellent history of Prohibition in America, beginning with the temperance movements in the nineteenth century, but concentrating on the period leading up to Prohibition and Prohibition and Repeal themselves. O'Krent makes the argument that this era had an enormous ( Read more... )

( Behind the cut )

Reading:
Gordon S. Brown - The Norman Conquest of Southern Italy and Sicily. A history of the establishment of the Norman kingdom in southern Italy, focusing on the eight sons of Tancred de Hautville who carved out what would eventually be Robert Guiscard's kingdom. Well-done and readable, although it is concerned mostly with politics and warfare ( Read more... )

( Consume *all* the media )

I'm over three months behind on my media updates, so I'm just going to cover what I'm reading/watching now.

Reading
J.R. Galloway - The Servant Girl Murders: Austin, Texas 1885. This is a collection of contemporary newspaper articles about the year-long series of rapes and murders that have gone down in history as the Servant Girl Annihilator ( Read more... )

Reading.
Jonathan Gill - Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History From Dutch Village to Capitol of Black America. I'm just over halfway through the book, and into the middle of the Harlem Renaissance. It's still an extremely enjoyable history, and I'm surprised at how little attention I'd previously paid to how much of New York City's history was ( Read more... )

Reading:
Jonathan Gill - Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History From Dutch Village to Capitol of Black America. Although I'm only up to the end of the American Revolution, I'm finding this history of Harlem to be both well-written and thoroughly enjoyable.

Jonathan R. Dull - The Age of the Ship of the Line: The British & French Navies, 1650-1815 ( Read more... )

(I'm so far behind, I'm just going to list the things since my last media update.)

ReadingJuliet Blackwell - In a Witch’s Wardrobe ( Read more... )