By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and had earned a comfortable retirement. The Admiralty gave him a plum position: an honorary post at ...
Read ReviewHampton Sides' book The Wide Wide Sea records the third and final voyage of Captain James Cook and relays some of the exploits of his crew aboard the HMS Resolution. One of Cook's key ...
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Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), known variously as the "Lady with the Lamp" or the "Ministering Angel" of the Crimean War (1853–1856), elevated the role of nursing ...
Read ReviewThe Crimean War of 1853–1856 pitted the Russian Empire against an alliance of British, French, Turkish and Sardinian troops on the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea. Britain entered the war in ...
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Ordinarily, upon sitting down to write a review of a guide to English language usage, I'd get myself pretty worked up, nervous about ensuring I didn't end a sentence with a preposition or forget what ...
Read ReviewThe American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel
Anne Curzan, author of Says Who?, has some compelling bona fides when it comes to remarking upon English grammar and usage. Not only is she a linguistics professor, she was also for many years a ...
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In the aftermath of the 1860 presidential election, the divided United States began to collapse as South Carolina seceded from the Union, followed by another six Southern states. Among the countless ...
Read ReviewAs Erik Larson recounts in The Demon of Unrest, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired on Fort Sumter, off the coast of South Carolina, at 4:30 a.m. on April 12th, 1861. Thirty-six hours...
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The Oscar-nominated film American Fiction (2023) and the Percival Everett novel it was based on, Erasure (2001), are about whose voices are heard and in what context. In the movie, Jeffrey Wright and ...
Read ReviewReimagining the Classics from a New Perspective
Percival Everett's James is a reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck's enslaved companion Jim. This kind of reconfiguration is a common source of inspiration ...
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Set around Lake Superior in the Upper Midwest, I Cheerfully Refuse depicts a near-future America that has collapsed to the point where it more closely resembles the past. The coasts are the domain of ...
Read ReviewLake Superior as Dystopian Setting
'The setting is a character in itself' is a moth-eaten critical insight about any book (or film, or TV show), but I Cheerfully Refuse stops just short of literally making Lake Superior a character. As...
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The Stolen Child
by Ann Hood
An unlikely duo ventures through France and Italy to solve the mystery of a child’s fate.
The Flower Sisters
by Michelle Collins Anderson
From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention.
The Familiar
by Leigh Bardugo
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author Leigh Bardugo comes a spellbinding novel set in the Spanish Golden Age.
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The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it...
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BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
