I had been thinking how terribly young the soldiers were that Ryszard Kapuściński wrote about in Another Day of Life when he brought me up short by noting that they were the same age as many of the fighters in the Warsaw Uprising at the end of World War II. Alexander Hamilton raised an artillery …
Tag: History
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/31/another-day-of-life-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/
Oct 28 2015
Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Between the time when Ryszard Kapuściński saw the revolution in Iran in 1979 and when Shah of Shahs, his book on the subject, was published in 1982, his home country of Poland lived through its own revolution, one that started with strikes at a shipyard in the northern port of Gdańsk but collapsed as the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/28/shah-of-shahs-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/
Oct 09 2015
Hild by Nicola Griffith
For real, if I’d known this novel would be the first in a series, I wouldn’t have bothered reading it till the rest came out. As it is, the book ends well before the… oh jeez, how to explain without spoilers? I know this is all based on what might as well be ancient history, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/09/hild-by-nicola-griffith/
Jul 29 2015
Romanticism and Positivism – The History of Polish Literature by Czeslaw Milosz
What could Polish literature do after Pan Tadeusz, a poem that Milosz said, “gradually won recognition as the highest achievement in all Polish literature”? For starters, literary eminence was contested by Mickiewicz’s contemporaries. “Besides his unrequited love, the other passion running through [Juliusz] Słowacki’s life was his desire first to equal, then to compete with, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/07/29/romanticism-and-positivism-the-history-of-polish-literature-by-czeslaw-milosz/
Jul 04 2015
Good Things I Wish You by A. Manette Ansay
So I’ve long been fascinated by the relationship between Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms (due to Personal Issues,) but my greatest takeaway from this novel is, in the end, who can explain these things? I’m not sure if that was A. Manette Ansay’s point (and if it was, I completely missed it) but I felt …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/07/04/good-things-i-wish-you-by-a-manette-ansay/
Jul 04 2015
Treatise on the Diseases of Women by Lydia Estes Pinkham
Fascinating insight into the world of medicine and health at the turn of the 20th century. Lydia Pinkham was certainly a pioneer in her frank discussions with women regarding their health. Essentially a collection of the advertising material created for her medicines, this book presents the most up-to-date (for the time) science regarding women’s health …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/07/04/treatise-on-the-diseases-of-women-by-lydia-estes-pinkham/
Jun 24 2015
More concerning The History of Polish Literature by Czeslaw Milosz
I thought that the next bit I wrote here would be about something lighter, or at least something fictional, but Milosz has well and truly grabbed and held my attention. The middle section that I have just finished, particularly the nearly 100 pages (out of 530 in the main text) Milosz devotes to Polish Romanticism, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/24/more-concerning-the-history-of-polish-literature-by-czeslaw-milosz/
Jun 18 2015
The History of Polish Literature by Czeslaw Milosz
Every literature should be so fortunate as to have a Nobel laureate write a textbook history of its development. The only down side I can see to The History of Polish Literature — so far, that is, I am up to the middle of the 18th century, although that’s just a little less than the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/18/the-history-of-polish-literature-by-czeslaw-milosz/
May 09 2015
History is Weird
The second offspring of [Jewish] messianic hopes [in eighteenth century Poland] was Frankism—from the name of its founder, Jacob Frank (?–1791). Frank’s father had fled Poland to escape persecution as a follower of Sabbatai Zevi, and Jacob Frank himself traveled widely in Romania and Greece, where (in Salonika) he met those believers in Sabbatai who …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/09/history-is-weird/
Feb 25 2015
Midnight at the Pera Palace by Charles King
Where to start when writing about a city as vast and storied as Istanbul? In Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul, Charles King takes an inflection point in the history of a city that is itself a key inflection between East and West. Or rather, he takes a period of hinges …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/02/25/midnight-at-the-pera-palace-by-charles-king/
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