Did you know that when the US entered the Great War, World War I, one-third of its population had been born overseas or had a parent who was an immigrant? In fact, at the height of the US deployment, nearly one in five American soldiers was foreign-born. These are the facts at the heart of David Laskin’s book The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War, though it is far from a mere recitation of facts. Laskin follows the lives of 12 men, 11 themselves immigrants, and relates the stories of their lives in Europe, their journeys to Ellis Island, and how each of them eventually found themselves on the frontlines. From the publisher’s description: When the United States entered World War I in 1917, one-third of the nation's population had been born overseas or had a parent ...
Category Archives: History
It’s All Greek to Me
It's All Greek to Me: From Homer to the Hippocratic Oath, How Ancient Greece Has Shaped Our World was everything I thought it would be and then a little bit more. Written by Charlotte Higgins, it has the feel of a professor in love with his or her subject about it. I was trying to find out who Higgins was and found very little personal information about her on the web. Her twitter account brands her the "chief arts writer of the Guardian and on-the-side classicist." She studied the classics in college (at Balliol College, Oxford) but appears to direct her "teaching" to the public at large, through books and blog. So, should you decide to pick up a copy of It's All Greek to ...
Bending Toward the Sun
It's just been in the past year that I became interested in the WWII era. To be honest, I shied away from it because it was so disturbing. However, I've recently endeavored to expand my reading horizons a bit, and have tackled some difficult material. Enter Bending Toward the Sun. This mother-daughter memoir is broken into three parts. The first (and by far the most interesting to me) is the story of Rita Lurie and members of her family who hid together in an attic for two years during the Holocaust. Rita recounts her early childhood before the family was forced into hiding, the years they stayed in the cramped attic, and the post-war journey that took them through Europe and eventually to America. Rita takes us through her life until her daughter, Leslie, is born. The second part of ...
The Monuments Men
I love World War II history but I have to say that I've never paid much attention to the issue of preserving the art and culture of Europe (and the world) while Hitler made his mad dash for power. Enter The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History which follows the journey and adventures of ten specific people (9 men and 1 woman) who worked during the war to preserve culture. As the author of this book, Robert M. Edsel points out, these were men and women who saved "the world as we know it" to be, so to speak. When I think of what was fought over during this war, I can't claim that ...
Outwitting History
What is Yiddish? Does anyone else know? I looked it up after reading Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books. I had heard of Yiddish and knew it was spoken by Jews. I've read a few books where maybe a line or two is included. But I wasn't really sure what it's origin is. For simplicity sake, I'll steal from Wikipedia: Yiddish is: is a non-territorial High German language of Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. Yiddish is conventionally written in the Hebrew alphabet. The language originated in the Ashkenazi culture that developed from about the 10th century in the Rhineland and then spread to central and eastern Europe and eventually to other continents. In the earliest surviving references to it, the language is called ...
Following the Nez Perce Trail
Following the Nez Perce Trail is not what I expected, really. It's cooler and better and way more interesting than what I originally had in mind! Following the Nez Perce Trail IS a history book. It details the story of the Nez Perce Indians being forced from their homeland in 1877. It covers quite a bit of territory - from Oregon to Oklahoma and all the way up to Canada. This book includes eye witness accounts of sorrow, horror and hope. Published by OSU Press, in the introduction to this 2nd Edition, author Cheryl Wilfong herself says that she drove 8,000 miles of this trail. The book includes pictures, historical facts, markers, etc. The unique aspect to this particular ...
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Jennifer Donovan
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