Book Review « Relax and Have Fun

Your Memory (and three other memory books)

To be able to remember many historical dates and details, to improve my reading apprehension and to help me learn Hebrew next year, I am developing my memory skills. I have started down this path a few times before over the last few years, and each time I thoroughly enjoyed the beginning steps but never […]

The Looming Tower

I picked up a copy of Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage) this weekend in Santa Fe. Started reading it just to fill in a few minutes, then couldn’t stop reading it. Apologies to all those who’s earlier recommendations of this book to me went unheeded […]

Promised Land, Crusader State

I picked up a copy of Walter A. McDougall’s Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 in 2007 at a used book store in DC’s Eastern Market. I read it this week because I wanted a quick review of the different ways that the US has dealt with the rest […]

The Yellow Wind

David Grossman’s The Yellow Wind: With a New Afterword by the Author is a series of short reports on life in the West Bank in the late 1980’s. The author is an Israeli novelist who spent seven weeks in the West Bank interviewing Palestinians and Israelis. I read the book on a break between histories […]

Thinking in Time

I learned about Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers by Richard E. Newstadt and Ernst R. May from AFSA’s recommended reading list when I started our book club last summer. I assume the text is still used in many college courses, because there are multiple copies available in several local used book […]