Books shelved under “History”

I grew up in the ’90s, and I vaguely remember on TV when I was a kid some kind of scandal involving this guy named Bill Clinton, whom I knew as the President of the United States. The word impeachment kept getting thrown around, but of course I didn’t really know what that meant. Fast-forward 20 years, and the word has resurfaced as a possible fate for the current President, Donald Trump—and this time, I…

Reader, I finished the first chapter but could not go any further. The writing (or maybe copyediting) of this book is atrocious.

I know that in this day and age commas are misunderstood beasts of punctuation. As someone very invested in eradicating comma splices from my students’ writing, I tend to lean on the side of using fewer commas when in doubt. Yet this book takes that position to the extreme. The result are torturous…

I’ve had Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari’s later book, sitting in a box waiting to be read for a couple of years now (because that’s how I roll). My bestie Amanda recently purchased Sapiens on the strength of several recommendations, with someone even suggesting she could use it as a university course textbook. However, she is neck-deep in writing a PhD thesis right now, so I’m subbing in! I do loves me some world…

So one day I was looking for some advertisements I could use with my English classes to discuss graphic texts and advertising strategies. I stumbled across Vintage Ad Browser's repository of Coca-Cola advertisements, and I was just captivated. It had never occurred to me before that Coca-Cola provides a perfect opportunity to chart the evolution of advertising over the course of more than a century. I pulled many ads through the decades to use with…

The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality is a history book masquerading as a physics book, and I like that. I’m just as interested in the history of science as I am in science itself. As the title implies, Paul Halpern focuses on the lives of Feynman and Wheeler, protégés who individually and collectively had their fingers on the pulse of physics for much of the twentieth century. Halpern…

One year ago I read Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers, in which she remembers the seven Indigenous youths who died far from home while attending Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School here in Thunder Bay. In that heartbreaking and essential work, she links these deaths to a structure of colonialism and white supremacy and an ongoing form of cultural genocide in which the government and the rest of us remain complicit. Now Talaga is back…

Every so often, you read a non-fiction book that just speaks to you, that sticks with you because it’s not just informative but because it fits your level of background knowledge and expands your understanding of a topic perfectly. Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet is such a book for me. Claire L. Evans traces the development of the modern Internet from its precursors, the earliest mechanical and electronic…

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy was published in 2015, and I was a little worried that being three years old would already render it obsolete. Fortunately, I was wrong. Stephen Witt’s explanation of the rise of mp3 and the transition from CDs to digital stores to streaming, along with the corresponding piracy, is clear and detailed and incredibly fascinating. This…

Well, this is definitely a story. About English. And it is very rude (lots of swearing, archaic and present-day). So in that sense, I suppose Tom Howell delivers exactly what is promised by the title The Rude Story of English.

I really hesitate to call this a work of non-fiction. Oh, there are facts in here. But Howell is very careful to hide them amongst a quite frankly impressive cornucopia of tall tales and…

This was a birthday gift, along with A Criminal Magic, from my friend Amanda, and I’m just now getting to it—which, especially when it comes to my non-fiction backlog, isn’t actually that bad of a delay! Amanda was just getting to know me at the time, so she picked two books off my to-read list. I’m not sure why I had Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety…

Our science teachers do a remarkable job with what limited resources, time, and support they have in school today. However, one of the many areas in which public science education could be improved is the way in which we examine the hidden systems that power science itself, and the way these systems intersect with our society. Cell lines are a great example of this. We learn about biomedical research in school, about cells, about vaccines—but…

Although I’ve been familiar with the concept for a while, I think I first came across the term Female Chauvinist Pig in Holly Bourne’s excellent How Hard Can Love Be?. In her novel, Bourne presents us with Melody, a stereotypical busty blonde who struts her stuff and embraces her sexuality and “hotness” because she believes that this is what makes her empowered in today’s society. It’s such an intriguing concept, something that interests me…

Hard to know what I could add to my previous review of Sophie’s World. I suppose in the 6 years that have passed since that second reading I have grown and changed and that means my perspective on this book will have changed as well. But I stand by the earlier review, and now I’ll just elaborate.

I bought this fresh copy of Sophie’s World as a gift; actually, I bought it twice over.…

One of my most favourite episodes of the new Cosmos (because, honestly, they are all so good) is Episode 10: “The Electric Boy”, which focuses on the life and discoveries of Michael Faraday. In particular, the episode emphasizes how the invention of the dynamo and the electric motor spurred on a whole new technological revolution. The electric motor is just ubiquitous now, even more so than smarter digital electronics, and we take it for granted…

As Canada celebrated its 150th birthday this year, reconciliation was increasingly a buzzword on the lips of politicians, journalists, and celebrities. Most people seemed to recognize that we have a ways to go in our relationship with Indigenous peoples—but most people also seem unwilling to put that recognition into action. As my recent review of Seven Fallen Feathers shows, our country is still a hostile place when it comes to Indigenous lives. And the present…

First of all, can we agree that it should be “95” or “ninety-five” but never “ninetyfive”, like WTF.

Distinctly weird hyphenation aside, 1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation, is a thoughtful examination of one of those well-celebrated yet mythologized moments in history. Peter Marshall uses the stories surrounding Luther’s apocryphal posting of the 95 theses to examine the character of the Reformation in Luther’s time, his legacy and effects on the…

Not actually my cup of tea, The Future of War: A History is a massive data dump and analysis of what we used to think about the future of warfare. Lawrence Freedman has clearly Done the Research, and I have to hand it to him: there’s compelling stuff here. Thanks to NetGalley and Public Affairs for the eARC.

I love the premise of this book. It kind of merges my passion for literature and my…

So … this is a proof copy from the publisher via NetGalley (tanks), and I have to just put it out there that I didn’t actually see any maps in this version. I don’t know if that’s by design or simply that they hadn’t been set into the book at the type this version was exported. It seems a little silly to me that a book called A History of Canada in Ten Maps does…

This is one of those tough books to rate and review, because anything I say is going to feel too harsh. Bad Girls from History is not a bad book by any means; I think there is a sizable audience out there for whom this could be an interesting and informative read. I’m just not a member of that audience. Dee Gordon’s dive into presenting 100 women who misbehaved is a little too encylopaedic, a…

Yeah, my dad bought me two books about Jane Austen a few birthdays ago, and I figured I should read them back-to-back so I could compare them. The other was A Brief Guide to Jane Austen. This one, Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World is much less a biography or analysis of her individual novels and much more an examination of how Austen went from moderately successful author in her time to…