Archive for The Book Bum - page 7

Merridale, Catherine. Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2013 (506pp. $35) Once the Slavic Rus tribe emerged as a force in Europe’s northeastern forest, they build a citadel for their warlord, one that would protect the tribe…

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Turner, Frederick. Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of ‘Tropic of Cancer’, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2012 (244pp.$24.95) Franz Kafka’s maxim that a book should be an ax to the soul applies in spades to Henry Miller’s masterpiece, “Tropic of Cancer,” published fifty years…

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Dalrymple, William. Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-42, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2013 (515pp.$30) The elephantine, racist and slightly bizarre Western imperial enterprise had some surprising impulses, none more than the one that impelled British troops into Afghanistan (then as now,…

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Prochnik, George. The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, Other Press, New York, 2014 (390pp.$27.95) Relentlessly middlebrow pop-intellectual Stefan Zweig, in the 1920s and 1930s, was the world’s most widely read and broadly translated writer of biographies, novellas and short-stories.   For…

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Wilson, A.N. The Elizabethans, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2012 (448pp.$30) The queen died unhappy, ravaged by time and illness, her realm disquieted by civil and religious factions that were equally adumbrated by frequent outbreaks of plague. The magistrates and sheriffs were hanging thieves,…

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Taylor, Frederick. The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class, Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2013 (416pp. $30) The story of Germany’s hyperinflation begins in the late summer of 1914 when her young men marched off to glorious war accompanied by…

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The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition, translated and collected by Jack Zipes, illustrated by Andrea Dezso, Princeton University Press, Princeton/Oxford, 2015 (519pp.$35) Romanticism, as a European aesthetic, rose at the end of the 18th century in direct…

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Labor, Earle. Jack London: An American Life, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2013 (461pp. $30) At the height of his fame in the early 1900’s, Jack London was earning ten thousand dollars a month from a variety of sources including royalties on his novels…

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Montefiore, Simon Sebag. Jerusalem: The Biography, Alfred A. Knopf, New York (650pp.$35) Hughes, Robert. Rome: A Cultural, Visual, Personal History, Alfred A. Knopf, New York (498pp.$35) On the 8th of the Jewish month of Ab in A.D. 70, the armies of the Roman Emperor Vespasian,…

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Schulman, David. Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty. Grand Central Publishing, Boston and New York, 2014 (424pp.$30) Driving into Wichita on old Highway 54 during the early 1960s, the visitor would encounter a large billboard with lettering…

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