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By Ms. G, December 31, 2019 9:14 am

You will notice that my list is almost entirely non-fiction. I do not apologize for this at all.

More and more students tell me they don’t read. That I find highly depressing and I want to inspire them to get their minds working! Offline.

Reading does truly take you to new worlds.

Don’t be prehistoric.  Read! https://www.goalexandria.com/dinosaur-posters/

Top 10 Books of 2000-2020

Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel, 1999 (so I count it as within the parameters as I read the paperback version). I have repeatedly said that this is my favourite book of all time. Given to me by a beloved student, this book is deeply personal yet also historical. It made Galileo, an arrogant yet brilliant guy, one of my favourite characters in history.

Becoming by Michelle Obama, 2018. I especially enjoyed the first part of the book about her childhood in Chicago. She’s candid and thoughtful and has a sense of social history without being ‘historical’. I honestly didn’t pay much attention to her when she was First Lady but I’m very impressed with her now.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, 2006. This book got me started on my journey toward veganism. Pollan, a journalist, investigates the American food system and alternatives to factory farming.

Salt by Mark Kurlansky, 2002. One of the first “commodity” books about the history of a thing. The author takes you on a trip shaped around everything related to salt, its making, different types that come from different parts of the world.

Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China by Jung Chang, 2013. A book about a very powerful figure (yet highly limited because of being a woman) with good and bad sides. History is complicated – very rarely will we find someone to admire 100%.

Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome by Anthony Everitt, 2009. Ever since I had to compare Hadrian and Trajan in a 2003 course on Roman history, I have had an interest in Hadrian (I chose him as a better ruler than Trajan). He was a complicated fellow, shall we say, who had very good intentions. But he was not nearly as well liked as his predecessor, the wildly popular Trajan.

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard, 2015. A wonderful writer who loves her subject makes for an excellent read. She has humour, ability to make the reader forget the present, and sharp analytical honesty. No wonder I am now on my third Mary Beard book. I hope to review it soon on the blog. She’s also a tv presenter of the most casual nature – I love how she travels to historical and archaeological sites in her high tops.

The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed by Judith Flanders, 2003. Maybe this too can be seen as a commodity book? It takes every room in a Victorian house and looks at the historical context, weaving in technology and gender roles and expectations. It took me forever to read this dense book but it was worth it!

The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Symbols by Genevieve von Petzinger, 2017. An anthropologist’s attempt to make sense of the symbols on paleolithic cave walls. It’s very scientific yet also takes some liberties to try to help the reader feel what it might have been like to be part of a paleolithic community.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert, 2015. Probably the best researched book I have ever read. This book looks at every angle on cotton and its interwoven history with industrialization, slavery and imperialism.

Fiction (mostly books I read for English credit recovery, but I only listed them here if I enjoyed them)

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, 1996 – I admit that I was sparked to read it by the 2017 tv series. However, I really enjoyed the mix of fiction and fact (real-life letters from the time of the trial of Grace Marks for an 1843 murder north of Toronto).

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, 2008. Much better than the movie! Sure, it’s a young adult novel, but it has sharply drawn, complicated characters.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, 1937. I originally read this book in grade 10 English class and I can’t say that it had any impact on me then. Reading it now, I see so much more in it – small, meaningful details in the sparsely written descriptions and keen dialogue.

Overall, what does my list say about me?

I’m a vegan historian.

Happy reading in 2020.

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By Ms. G, July 20, 2019 7:51 pm

With more time to read, I’ve recently finished Ross King’s Mad Enchantment. It’s the story of Claude Monet and the painting of his water lilies. Obviously I’m a fan of Ross King having read five of his other art history books. I quite liked the style of this one but I can’t quite say the same for Monet. A person can love his art yet think he was a big whining old fart. At least in the later stage of his life, Monet was a disagreeable codger who got a lot of favours done for him during World War I. Otherwise, it’s an interesting portrait of Georges Clemenceau, a figure I knew little of.

I’m nearly done Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, a really intriguing book. To say that Temujin had a hard life is a gigantic understatement. But to say that he was smart is too. The author is fairly heavily biased toward the great khan, but he backs it up with a lot of details about how he unified the Mongols. Unfortunately not all of his children and grandchildren were so intellectually inclined. I’m just at the part now where Kublai Khan takes over China. It’s quite a different story than what we read in the textbooks. Where the truth lies, I’m not sure. I’ll have to research that more. One thing that has struck me is the religious openness of the Mongols – aside from their own form of spiritualism, there were also Mongol Christians, Buddhists and Muslims. In this book the Mongols are painted as early globalizers. Fascinating and timely.

I’m well into The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. However, I can’t seem to keep with it. I absolutely love the writing and am enamoured of the main character, Aminata; it’s just too sad. It’s rare for me to read fiction so I’m kind of daring myself to finish it despite the horrible subject matter.

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By Ms. G, April 29, 2018 2:36 pm

I’ve fallen a bit behind in my book reviews so I’ll just quickly say a few words about a some books I’ve read lately.

The Trouble with Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure by Shawn Micallef (2014).

Someone at Val’s office lent him this book and I pilfered it. It was a short and relatively fast read, kind of interesting.

Micallef details his Windsor sort of working class background and how it gives him a more realistic sense of class. He does discuss brunch a lot, probably too much. He dissects it as a reflection of our class consciousness. He also quotes Thorstein Veblen a lot. Veblen was a late 19th century – early 20th century thinker who wrote about the leisure class and conspicuous consumption.

Micallef also writes some things that he doesn’t quite finish up on about farmers markets. Though his experiences aren’t just Toronto-centered, I did like his local references, particularly to the Riverdale Farmers Market (which is quite different from the ones I frequent at East York Civic Centre and in Peterborough).

Micallef is a freelance columnist for the Toronto Star. He has a good sense of a city as a living, breathing entity. That I like a lot.

—

Ancient Worlds: A Global History of Antiquity by Michael Scott (2016).

This big book didn’t start off too well for me – the chapter on Roman-Indian interaction just went over my head. However, the subsequent chapters really captivated me. Scott’s main idea is that cross-cultural interaction defines history, yet each particular interaction has its own characteristics.

His case studies, so to speak, were Han China and its incorporation of Buddhism from India, Armenia and its incorporation of Christianity, and Constantine’s slow road to Christianity in the eastern half of the Roman Empire.

I have to say that I absolutely loved the parts on Armenia and Constantine. Who knew I had such interests? I have never read anything about Armenia’s ancient history. It turns out that Christianity was incorporated in such a way to bolster the ruling class. What a surprise! The parts on Constantine were eye opening too even though I know a fair bit about him and his time. What I did glean is a lot more about the way that the internal divisions within early Christianity were used by Constantine and his advisors to bring in tolerance of a highly persecuted religion.

As a person who teaches ancient history this book presents a real challenge to me. I absolutely want to incorporate its findings, and more importantly its global history ethos. However, time is limited and students don’t tend to do well in a global framework without a culture-specific framework first (at least in my experience they don’t). It’ll take me some time to figure out how to make use of this.

For those interested in this new stream of global histories, I highly recommend this book.

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Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga (2017).

I wrote about this book in my OHASSTA blog post in March after having heard the author speak at our TDSB PD conference in February.

I was very touched by it, so much so that I kind of developed an anger toward Thunder Bay. I wanted to visit the north shore of Lake Superior – now I’m not so sure.

I truly feel all Canadians should read this book. We need to know that the legacy of residential schools lives on in such horrible ways. Yet the people portrayed in the book are so full of resilience and caring.

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I have just started a new book. After reading about paleolithic cave paintings earlier in the school year I thought I’d follow up with something on archaeology.

Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender, and Archaeology by Rosemary Joyce (2008).

More to come when I finish it. I’m only a few pages in – interesting interpretations about Venus figurines already!

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By Ms. G, August 7, 2017 12:28 pm

Mark Kurlansky, Paper, 2016

I don’t necessarily read a Mark Kurlansky book about “something” to learn stuff about that thing. I prefer all the other things I learn along the way. In that sense, Paper didn’t disappoint. The journey included interesting stops on the topics of Egyptian papyrus, Chinese calligraphy, the Reformation, the American Revolution, the industrial process (which I am really into right now), the rag trade, and of course the printing process.

Years ago I read Kurlansky’s Salt (2002) and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was probably my first “commodity biography”, or book about a certain thing. From then I went on to acorns, soil, cochineal (little red bugs that make ink), cotton, and various other things that I can’t recall anymore. I do recall enjoying this type of historical tourism – learning a bit of this, a bit of that as I vicariously travel the globe. One more reason why I don’t need to travel in real life.

Perhaps in the subsequent years I have come to expect more of a narrative linking the tourist sites (or topics) together. Though I really like Kurlansky’s thesis, I think he only threw it in when he remembered it was important.

The narrative arc that is supposed to join the book together is what he calls the ‘technological fallacy’: “Technological inventions have always arisen from necessity. … Studying the history of paper exposes a number of historical misconceptions, the most important of which is this technological fallacy: the idea that technology changes society. It is exactly the reverse. Society develops technology to address the changes that are taking place within it.”

I totally agree with this. From my somewhat Luddite standpoint in this technologically obsessed world, I wish people would recognize that the technology they use doesn’t have to drive them. Oh well, seems I’m a total loser on that one.

I agree with Kurlansky that, in historical comparison, we are not living in the most change-driven era ever. Certainly the era of the 1790s to the late 1800s was seeing much more change in daily life than we are. And the changes were far-reaching in their impact, at home where the machinery may have been putting people out of work, and abroad where slavery and imperialism were working hand in hand to entrench the use of non-white people as labour to feed the white industrialized world. That is the thesis of Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert (2015), an incredibly well researched, thorough book that holds onto its thesis very tightly. Perhaps in that sense I’m a bit disappointed with Paper because it’s more of a journalistic effort than a true history. But it’s not really a fair comparison.

Paper is still as ubiquitous as ever, despite the so-called digital revolution. Everyone should have a sense of its history. I recommend Paper, whether you read it on a e-reader or in book form. No big shock that I only read books on paper. Otherwise my library would be physically empty.

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By Ms. G, July 20, 2017 12:00 pm

No, not the animal. GOAT – greatest of all time. Roger Federer? While he has now won eight Wimbledon titles and 19 majors overall, he may be a contender. It’s hard to imagine him self-labeling as GOAT. I don’t know him, of course, but he doesn’t seem the egotistical type.

(ATP World Tour photo)

The most famous of all should be Muhammad Ali, the boxer, not the Egyptian khedive (for those of you who are history-minded). Ali appears to have first used this phrase to describe himself, though not necessarily the acronym which seems to be a more recent phenomenon.

Full disclosure: I hate boxing. However, I was thoroughly engrossed in David Remnick’s 1998 partial biography King of the World: Muhammad Ali and  the Rise of an American Hero. It’s more of a social history  – my favourite – than a boxing tale though it certainly does have some colourful descriptions of his most famous matches with Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. Much in the same vein as Ken Burns’s documentaries Jazz and Baseball opened the door on segregation in the US, especially in the northern states where one might not have expected it to be so strong, King of the World reveals the boxing world of early to mid-1960s in its all its grittiness. In today’s parlance, we might say it was a highly racialized playing field. Ali, with his ties to the Nation of Islam (or Black Muslims as they were derisively known by Ali’s critics), was a crucial figure in trying to recast the Black boxer as an independent figure. Not the white man’s Black man, not the Black civil rights integrationist hero.

Since Ali died in 2016 there have been many tributes and documentaries that have portrayed him as the ultimate American hero, most notably as the final torch bearer at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games opening ceremony. However, it’s important to remember that he wasn’t always perceived as a hero by the American public, thus the “rise of an American hero” in Remnick’s title. Because he associated with Malcolm X (before breaking off ties with him as per Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad’s wishes), because he out-rightly expressed his desire not to integrate but to remain separate, at this stage of his career Ali faced a huge public backlash. Certain sports columnists refused to even refer to him as Muhammad Ali.

At least at the stage of his career highlighted in this book, Ali was a complicated character, at once a professional athlete with excellent training habits and a fast-talking provocative player with a mouth as big as his talent.

I urge readers to pick up the book and find out for themselves what Ali – one of the world’s most celebrated heroes – was really like. It won’t hurt that Remnick, New Yorker editor, is a fabulous writer.

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By Ms. G, July 14, 2017 11:24 am

I just bought this book, and I just finished this book. Usually I am not a quick reader; in fact, I am reading four other books right now. On so many levels I just could not put it down.

Absolute kudos to Helen Macdonald, an absorbingly beautiful nature writer. I love nature (to look at it) and I love birds: What a wonderful combination in the hands of Macdonald. Weave in some psychology, history and literature and you have an enthralling story. Fellow history person (she is a teacher of history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University), Macdonald was, from a young age, obsessed with hawks and became a falconer. The book tells the story of how she trained a goshawk after the sudden death of her father, a very special person in her life. So yes, it is a psychological tale of coping with grief through depression.

There are many reasons why I wouldn’t like, or even want to read, this book. Admittedly the goshawk is a bird I had never heard of. I looked it up in our birding books at the cottage. My closest experience is with “Ossie”, the osprey that visits the tallest branch of the tree at the cottage next to ours. Ospreys are related to eagles, not hawks. Both eat meat (well, ospreys eat fish). The book contains many vivid descriptions of hawks tearing apart rabbits or being fed baby chicks. More correctly, during the training process, Mabel the hawk would catch the rabbits and Helen the trainer would kill them. Not exactly a book for vegans, one would think.

The other reason the book wouldn’t seemingly be fit for me is that it is a literary exploration of falconry through the ages, and I, directly, don’t do literature. In particular, Macdonald weaves into her personal story the biography and work of TH White, author of The Once and Future King, the source material for the play Camelot. I know nothing about King Arthur and Merlyn and all that stuff. Have no interest in it whatsoever. However, Helen Macdonald does a masterful job of making the reader care about this complicated character, even a misfit,  who also tried to train a goshawk.

Now on to finish David Remnick’s King of the World: Muhammad Ali and Rise of an American Hero which I started a few months ago at the cottage. Ali (then still Cassius Clay) is about to win his first big fight against Heavyweight Champion Sonny Liston. From great nature writing to masterful sports writing.

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By Ms. G, January 31, 2016 5:48 pm

Elizabeth Kolbert’s book was a welcome Christmas gift from Mr. Mahoney. He knows I like science and the environment and good writing. I promptly read it in a few days after Christmas was over when I was recovering from eating so much.

Reading Kolbert’s book on mass extinctions of species, one must wonder whether the earth will ever recover from humans’ folly. Or rather, will species, who, through no fault of their own, find themselves out of luck, out of habitat, out of oxygen, out of adaptation techniques, whatever.

Ask the bats of North America, frogs and toads throughout the world, long lost mastadons, or coral in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Kolbert chooses an interesting array of animals and plants to survey in her quest to verify if we really are in the midst of another in a series of mass extinctions that have occurred throughout earth’s history. Accordingly, as a science journalist, not a scientist, she must seek out the advice and guidance of many leading scientists, including a lot of geologists.

I particularly appreciated the geologic angle given my interest in Charles Darwin. Darwin, the father of evolution by means of natural selection, was influenced by the work of Charles Lyell. Lyell was an early geologist that proposed that earth changes slowly over time. Kolbert brings him into the extinction argument as he was one of the first people to propose a theory of how extinctions actually work. She spends a lot of well worth it time tracing the history of the theory of extinction. One wouldn’t think that was interesting but it was.

I feel guilty about saying that I enjoyed this book immensely. A resident of this current world should not be happy about a book that makes it clear how much we have changed it, for the worse. While Kolbert doesn’t focus in on climate change specifically, she does give a lot of attention to ocean acidification, a topic not too many of us know about, and one that is a sort of correlation to climate change. I was never particularly interested. Now I’ll definitely want to watch David Attenborough’s Great Barrier Reef, recently on CBC.

It’s not a book that offers solutions. For that, readers might want to follow up with something like Mike Berners-Lee’s How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything.  For a vegan such as myself, the book that really got me on the road to thinking about how the environment affects my daily life through food is Michael Pollan’s 2006 masterwork, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I’m not critical of Kolbert for not suggesting how to solve our problem. What she is doing is changing attitudes, something that is absolutely necessary before behaviour can be changed. Near the end of the book she tells the sad stories of a certain raven and a very particular rhino. You really have to read the book to appreciate how poignant they are.

Like Mary Roach, author of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, an investigation into the human digestive system (previously reviewed on this blog), Elizabeth Kolbert knows how to use her talents as a writer along with her skill as a researcher to bring a subject alive (no pun intended in this case).

The Sixth Extinction: highly recommended.

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By Ms. G, July 20, 2015 9:17 am

Cool Gray City of Love by Gary Kamiya

Bloomsbury, 2013

I don’t tend to read happy or uplifting books. So it should come as no surprise that the gem of a book I just finished was not self-selected. Val got it as a gift from a friend of his who is currently living in San Jose, California. The book is a collection of 49 ‘sketches’ of San Francisco. I took posession immediately after it arrived in the mail a few days ago.

Before getting into the book, I want to contrast it with my usual types of books. Right now I am also reading (a.k.a. plodding through) Anne Applebaum’s Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956. I have been reading it on and off for about two or three months – it is that heavy. Though Applebaum is an amazing writer and fills her book with meticulous details about the events that brought Poland, East Germany and Hungary under Soviet control, she also fills her books with horrors. However interesting the stories are, they are sad and they just go on and on. It is for that same reason that I couldn’t finish her earlier book, Gulag: A History.

No wonder I grabbed Cool Gray City of Love and didn’t put it down until I finished it.

I was also deeply attracted because I have a thing for San Francisco. Most people know I’m not much of a traveler, yet I have been to the city by the bay four times (I know this is not much in the annals of travel but it is for me). Each time I’ve stayed somewhere different: touristy Union Square in a posh hotel, shoppy Union Street in a potentially seedy motel, upscale Cow Hollow in a nicer motel a block away from a granola-style restaurant, and Emeryville in a standard Hilton Garden Inn (doesn’t really count – it’s across the bay at the end of the Bay Bridge). Last time Val and I were in San Francisco, only for a day, it was a wonderful day. We picked one thing to do, walk up Telegraph Hill, and it happens that it’s Kamiya’s favourite place in San Francisco. Apparently there’s a lot more to it than the views.

Kamiya is one of those writers who fills his chapters with apropos literary references, few of which I get because I’m not a fiction reader. However, he mostly paints city pictures with his own cheeky little prose style. He meshes his personal experiences, either familiar recollections or new tours with experts both geological and historical, with the rather odd history of the city.  Socrates would have loved this guy having been a fanatical city dweller himself. What’s particularly nice and quite informative is that he goes back to the times when the Yelamu Indians lived on the peninsula and is very respectful of these now-disappeared people’s history.

The book’s genesis lies in Kamiya giving himself the task of ‘learning’ his own city, bit by bit, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. It surely didn’t hurt that he was also quite familiar with it through his years as a cab driver. What a way to learn a city, not just its places but its people. His cabbie stories don’t disappoint, especially the one about luring a gay fare away from a fellow driver. This view of the city gives him an ‘if these walls could talk’ advantage.

The other advantage Kamiya has is his sheer love of his city, warts, guts, glories and all. Natural and man-made, touristy and off the beaten path, he loves it all. He loves the mix of inspiring landscapes and spirited people. He loves their struggles to keep San Francisco unique and non-conformist. And he’s honest about the times when battles have been lost such as in the demolition of entire neighbourhoods in favour of highrises. The story of a neighbourhood called the Western Addition, which was home to Japanese families before they were forced to leave the west coast because of World War Two internment, is quite poignant. When the Japanese left, African Americans moved in. While not all the Japanese returned after the end of the war, some did and the question became what to do with them now that they were back and their homes and businesses were occupied. It reminds me of the story my grandmother used to tell of living in wartime Vancouver: all those nice Japanese people just disappeared.

Kamiya is critical of his city and some of its past decisions; he is not a booster in the 100% unquestioning sense. I can relate to this. I consider myself to live in the epicentre of a beautiful and functioning city. But that’s the view from where I am at Broadview and Danforth in my comfortable life. I don’t sit in traffic for two hours a day. I walk two minutes to the subway when I want to get somewhere downtown.

Toronto may not be knowable in the same way – it’s such a huge sprawling city and so much larger in population. Maybe the old City of Toronto (in which I live) could be approached this way.

The reason that Stephen W. of San Jose (formerly of Toronto and Kitchener) sent this book to Val is that he knows Val is a Toronto-lover. He thinks Val could write the Toronto version of Cool Gray City of Love some day. Val used to write a column on Torontoist.com about hidden places in Toronto. I can think of more than a few times when I’ve benefitted from his knowledge. When we first met he took me on a hike on the Don Valley trails – not the well-worn paths but places that were unknown, at least to Risa from North York. A few years ago he lead a bike tour through the laneways of the east side. A little history, a little geography, a big city made little.

A lot of Val’s love of the city has rubbed off on me. I feel like I know Gary Kamiya and I appreciate where he is coming from. I don’t mind that each one of the 49 chapters ends with his unabashed, almost embarrassing love for his city.

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By Ms. G, August 10, 2014 4:17 pm

It is odd that I picked up a book called Tobacco (2001). I hate tobacco in all its forms. It is a vile substance in my estimation.

So, oddly, I just finished Iain Gately’s Tobacco which had been sitting on my pile of cheap books for a while, at least two years. I like books about single subjects –  acorns, salt, cochineal beetles – because they reveal so much about social history. Tobacco is no different. Covering a very wide time span, from the Spanish conquest of the “New World” to the heyday of anti-tobacco law suits in the 1990s, the book tells the stories of fads, motivations, restrictions, gender roles, class differences, cultural preferences, advertising motifs and pure old dependence.

Gately has a very English style of understatement that made me laugh out loud quite a few times. He says this of the early Spanish conquest: “Relations between the Spaniards and Americans were limited to exploitation and sex.” I probably would have put the book away for another two years if I hadn’t stopped to read that line over a few times, now aware that Gately is capable of succinct mockery. As one who teaches this horrible period in human history I do appreciate the reference.

Hitler hated tobacco. Duke University was so-named after a gift of millions of dollars to Little Trinity College by Buck Duke, founder of the American Tobacco Company. Smoking jackets were designed so that weak women wouldn’t have to smell tobacco on their aristocratic husbands. Prohibition was a great boon to smoking. The book is full of interesting little nuggets like this. It is a quick trip through American and British popular culture.

What I didn’t like about the book was the ending. Gately seems to have succumbed to his own sub-title: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization. In the end he is seduced by the allure of tobacco, good and bad: “Many great men and women have left elegant testimonies to their tobacco habits, which will be joined, I believe, with others made in centuries to come.” I don’t know if he’s a smoker or not, cigar or cigarette, but as a vehement anti-smoker I don’t have any sympathy for smokers whatsoever and I certainly don’t think their stories are elegant. More recently it seems Gately has taken up the subject of alcohol (2008’s Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol). As a non-drinker I will not be imbibing.

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By Ms. G, August 3, 2014 12:16 pm

Thunderstruck, by Erik Larson, is another in his historical murder series. Having previously read The Devil in the White City I knew to expect two intertwining stories set in a beautifully described city; this one involves Marconi and his development of wireless telegraphy plus American doctor Hawley Harvey Crippen who gruesomely murders his annoying wife. The city is London in the Edwardian period. Certainly this book is not as exciting or gripping as The Devil in the White City but it does have the same easy to read yet not trite writing style. I enjoyed the descriptions of London’s neighbourhoods so much that I have determined to go there next summer. The two plots come together when the wireless telegraph is used to capture Crippen and his disguised lover on their way to Canada aboard a a Canadian Pacific steamer.

One of the difficult aspects of this book is the character of Marconi. He is awful: socially obtuse, ego-maniacal. Yet he is not the murderer in the book. Larson makes no bones about Marconi’s dislikeable character. Perhaps he is so accurate in his description that he leaves the reader disinterested and morally disgusted. I couldn’t wait for the Marconi chapters to be over. I knew that mild-mannered Dr. Crippen was going to turn out to be a murderer yet I enjoyed the descriptions of him so much more. Seemingly patient in putting up with his demanding wife, Dr. Crippen turned out to be driven to the wall, poisoning and dismembering his wife. His turned out to be one of the most famous murder cases in British history. I knew nothing of it.

Oddly, it turns out that Marconi’s chief rival, Tesla, who does not figure in this book, was severely lacking in social skills as well. He ended up befriending pigeons. Marconi did marry, twice.

I will read another Erik Larson book. The man is a sincerely talented writer.