Rhonda
I loved the whole book, but particularly one of the stories concerning a young woman attending Shakespeare plays.
this book was actually bad enough that it put me in a bad mood. I'm going to go eat a sandwich and not vomit it up and hope I can cleanse my memory of this one. Unfortunately I can never get the time I spent reading this back.
If this “book” somehow became the last thing on the planet to read, I'd gouge my own eyes out to prevent myself from becoming bored and desperate enough to read it.
Garrison Davis' Stone Bones is what you get when a 74 year old man who has been banned from hamm radio and is hella bored in his South Carolina domicile decides to take his 6th grade education and penchant for kids and self publish to Amazon.
This “novella” isn't worthy to be used as kindling for a fire. Davis can hardly string together a sentence with his addled old brain. Nothing more than a creepy old man's last ditch effort to groom young men online.
The cover claims it's an “important book by an important writer.” I agree. I don't think I've ever cared about more people in an average of 10 pages or less than I did in this collection. Wonderful book.
Solid general overview. Gives you everything you need to know to get started on your study of Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood. The 3d maps are particularly interesting.
Please white man, try to tell us what the Sioux were thinking...
3 stars because for the time period it was a groundbreaking work. However, Rex Alan Smith said it was mostly a battle (hard to have a battle with people you have disarmed). It's out of date–anthropologists and archaeologists have worked to reconstruct the scene at Wounded Knee, we can answer some of these questions now, and finally, you just can't justify a massacre... To say Wounded Knee was “partly a massacre” hardly captures it.
I feel ashamed I read it to be honest but I was trying to grab some holiday spirit with my kid and this is what we did and we both groaned a lot.
Suzanne Tyrpak proves that, just because you like something, does not mean you should write about it. As far as stories go, she had some good ideas but I never felt like she actually delivered and spun off in too many directions. I also felt she was very repetitive and predictable. I am not sure why I finished this book, as I had the whole thing figured out very early.
One of the more disturbing books I have ever read. It is hard to escape life without hearing about the atrocities of the Holocaust or Dresden or the bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but as a history degree wielding woman about to start a master's, I had heard precious little about the Rape of Nanking until deciding to read this book. What I read shocked me–it was much like the grittiest of horror films, except I had the knowledge that all of this actually happened. Chang also did a great job explaining the multitude of reasons we DON'T hear about the Rape of Nanking. Easily one of the harshest things I've ever read, and I will be doing more research on my own.
I actually had a hard time reading this one, but it was quite short (novella, obv) so I finished it. I understand why it was such a sensation years ago. It was pretty sad.
Excellent book, full of rich characters and history. Great story about a period of Egyptian history not usually in the historical fictions I have read.
I did not like this as much as I have liked her other works, but it was still enjoyable. It lead to a lot of independent reading about the French Revolution for me, and thus a lot of learning.
Good story, but I was bored in patches since Card decided to ramble and over explain situations and feelings.
A wonderful cure for insomnia. I fell asleep every time I picked this up.
Quick summary:
Teddy Roosevelt listened to JP Morgan, Rockefeller and so on. Political conservatism started around 1900, not before. JP Morgan & co. were puppet masters. Government and business worked together to destroy small business. Etc.
I found it rather disjointed, to be honest. I'm new to Russian history and found the book to jump around from 1907-1932, making the actual timeline hard to follow at times.
I wish I could say I loved this book. I did not. Penman tries to write a historical novel that is one part text book, one part traditional historical fiction, wherein the characters have conversations that sound like historians talking centuries later. For instance: “...You've outwitted or outfought two English kings, unified your people, secured the succession for Davydd, and engendered a sense of shared identity amongst the Welsh, an awareness of their common identity.” ... I do not think any one having a conversation, in the moment, with their husband would speak of their deeds like that. “Ooh, you gave them a shared sense of identity! No, that's the line a historian uses.
That being said, I learned a ton of English/Norman and Welsh history. Before picking up this book I knew nothing of Llewelyn, of Joan/Joanna, little of King John or any of this era of history, some by choice. I studied Native American as my graduate school specialty, and left the English history to, well, basically everyone else trying to get a history degree. Thus, this is the reason I keep Penman's book as a 3 star and may even read some of the other Welsh Prince's books. It gave me the information I needed to launch into study I enjoyed.
