This review is for the audiobook edition.While I'm normally the guy screaming "make more books audiobooks!!", in this particular case I sort of which the publishers had chosen otherwise.First, the Narrator has a moderately annoying voice. Not the worst I've ever heard (not bad enough to give me ...
I'm a fan of Kurlanski's work, so when I saw this audio at my library, I snapped it right up. This particular audio is a perfect example of how bad narration can ruin a perfectly adequate book. The narrator has the oddest narration style I've ever come across, with short bursts of fast words foll...
Mark Kurlansky is a historical writer who does what one reviewer referred to as the “little-big” style of writing, that is to say, he takes something little and often overlooked and from it he spins out larger truths about society and the world. To say that he does this well would be an understat...
The subtitle of this book lets you know what to expect if you pick it up intending to read it: Nonviolence: Twenty Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea.For me, nonviolence is a part of an ideal world. I am drawn to it but do not know where in my being it originated. I do not want to ...
Commerce, consumption and the end of an eraAwhile back, I read The Oyster: The Life and Lore of the Celebrated Bivalve to learn how oysters reproduce. Apparently, I developed a little crush on the bivalves -- not in the gastronomical sense; I’ve never eaten one -- because when I saw The Big Oyste...
An excellent story about a NYC neighborhood and the characters that inhabit it.The thing w/ this book is you don't feel like you're reading the author's story. Nick Kurlansky has succeeded in completely removing his voice from the pages, a feat I have rarely encountered in works of fiction and o...
Those who argue that economic exploitation of natural "resources" can go on for ever because it always has gone on, should read Mark Kurlansky's book "Cod, A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World". The book is not primarily about the collapse of stocks in the early 1990s but rather a fasci...
To some, 1968 was the year of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Yet it was also the year of the Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy assassinations; the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; Prague Spring; the antiwar movement and the Tet Offensive; Black Power; the generatio...
A POWERFUL, DEEPLY MOVING NARRATIVE OF HOPE REBORN IN THE SHADOW OF DESPAIR Fifty years after it was bombed to rubble, Berlin is once again a city in which Jews gather for the Passover seder. Paris and Antwerp have recently emerged as important new centers of Jewish culture. Small but proud Jew...
I've given up on rating this book because I have a lot of mixed feelings about it. The Basque History of the World will serve those who want an introduction to Basque Culture well. It covers both Basque History and the Basque perspective and participation in World History. It is written with the ...
—WASHINGTON IRVING, A History of New York from the Beginnings of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, 1809 The Dutch who came to New Netherlands fell in love with the lower Hudson and especially the island of Manhattan. Beginning with those first few days in the harbor on the three-masted H...
From Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis to Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, there was wide disagreement on tactics within the civil rights movement, but they all agreed that an event needed to attract the news media. And it became obvious to the violent and nonviolent alike that violence...
—Horace, ODES, 23 B.C. WHEN BASQUES FIRST began appearing on the stage of recorded history, even before there was a name for them, they were observed acting like Basques, playing out the same roles that they have been playing ever since: defending their land and culture, making complex choices ab...
It was from Karl Moltke in West Berlin. March 12, 1967 Dear Joel, I hope you remember me. I am sending this to your parents because I don’t know where you are. But here in Berlin I am thinking of you as we learn in the movement about the great struggle in the U.S. and I hope that we are now broth...
It was a cramped little room with tiled walls. The dimensions and lack of windows suggested that it might have once been a closet. There was enough space for a desk, a file cabinet, and three chairs. Benancio Rodríguez Montaño, a thin, four-foot-tall elderly man with sunken cheeks and no teeth, w...
CHOWDER FORBREAKFAST, AND CHOWDER FOR DINNER, AND CHOWDERFOR SUPPER, TILL YOU BEGIN TO LOOK FOR FISH-BONESCOMING THROUGH YOUR CLOTHES. THE AREA BEFORETHE HOUSE WAS PAVED WITH CLAMSHELLS. MRS. HUS-SEY WORE A POLISHED NECKLACE OF CODFISH VERTEBRA;AND HOSEA HUSSEY HAD HIS ACCOUNT BOOKS BOUND INSUPER...
It was not so much the sea in their faces as the river at their backs. The Po starts in the Italian Alps and flows straight across the peninsula, spreading into a marshy estuary from Ravenna to Venice. The valley of the Po is an anomaly of the Italian peninsula, so strikingly different that its u...
In fact, the monastic movement was to a large degree a rejection of the Church state with its wealth, power, and wars. This is why the Church refused, and still refuses, to support them. Monks and nuns produced crops, bread, jam, wine, liqueurs, and cheeses while they illuminated stunning manuscr...
C. NELSON Nebraska has long been America’s leading producer of popcorn, with Indiana as its only serious rival, although the Popcorn Institute is in Chicago and the Popcorn Museum in Marion, Ohio. Like most of the stories surrounding “the first Thanksgiving” in 1621 the legend of the Indian Quade...
But as perverse fate had it, it was at this time that memory started returning. In 1965, Marian Turski accidentally discovered his loss of memory at the twentieth anniversary of the liberation of Theresienstadt, where he was talking with a well-known Polish Jewish figure with whom he had been in ...