Travels in Siberia
Ian Frazier
Frazier’s dense and fascinating look at Siberia from seven trips over two decades makes a nowhere place into somewhere. Most often associated with gulag camps and cold, Siberia is as as vast and varied hunk of land as the US. Starting with his early fascination with the country, Frazier recounts his earliest forray into Siberia and his decision to mount a full-scale trip. The seven week drive across the country shows both beautiful country and the ravages of an ugly past – from the Mongols to Communism. His accounts of the residents, food, swarms of mosquitoes and their ever-dying van make the trip into an adventure. A fair amount of Russian history is mixed in, though without the tedious rote of a textbook. In later trips,...
Devil-Devil
Graeme Kent
Kent has managed to create one of the rarest of novels. Set in the Solomon Islands in the 1960s as colonial rule is disintegrating, many of the bright boys are given a European education in preparation to take over control of the country. These men vacillate between their traditional village lifestyles and beliefs and their eastern education and Christianity. Kent does the amazing job of giving a solid chunk of island history, the beliefs and religions of the various Solomon Island tribes and families, colonial attitude, the life of a missionary and much more… all without the usual tedious couple of paragraph expositions crammed in here and there. His dialogue flows between Sergeant Kella, a police officer officially looking for a missing...
Face to Face: Polar Portraits
Huw Lewis-Jones
This is a brilliant and gripping collection of photos, some almost 150 years old, of the brave (and possibly insane) women and men who explore the poles. The book gives a wide range of vignettes – the big names like Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton – but also their crew, modern explorers and scientists, Inuit residents and guides and other integral people. Beautiful, often unreal, photos accompanied by gripping ...
Speech*less: Tales of a White House Survivor
Matt Latimer
Matt Latimer is one of those fortunates who has a dream, a plan and the ability to reach his goals. Not so fortunately, once he obtained his dream job, he found his dream was not all he had hoped. A political junkie and the only conservative in a family of liberals, Latimer single-mindedly worked his way up he political ladder, starting as a speechwriter for minor politicians. But when his his uber-goal of working as a speech-writer for the POTUS comes true, Latimer was thrown into the fast-disintegrating world of George W. Bush’s regime. The politicians and law-makers were nothing like Latimer had imagined. Their behavior is often bizarre and ...
Thunderstruck
Erik Larson
Thunderstruck, by the author of The Devil in the White City, is another action- and fact-filled non-fiction book. Weaving together the stories of Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the wireless, and the infamous murderer Dr. Crippen, Larson makes two disparate stories overlap and interweave into one. Based on solid research, Larson tells of Marconi’s struggles to make the Marconi machine (wireless technology) into a viable business. Danger came from the electricity he worked with, wretched weather around the places he built his towers and threats from other inventors. His selfish and often callous nature also caused him harm. Despite all, his crowning...
Photography in Japan: 1853-1912 -
Terry Bennett
The actual text of this book is dull beyond words. It chronicles the various European photographers who first photographed Japan, along with later European and japanese photographers and their studios. Yep, dull.
The images are magnificent. They show an exotic and beautiful world, now long gone. Narrow winding streets, geisha in full kimonos, castles with rice-paper windows and samurai in their mustached helmets are captured as their country is being engulfed by the west. Check out this marvelous website for some of the images:...