Reading Rambo

I. love. this. book. I feel no qualms in saying it should be required reading in school. Heroines of Mercy Street covers the women who volunteered, organized, and worked as nurses in the Civil War. We know words like Gettysburg, Bull Run, Antietam, and others, but we aren't told what happened after them – what happened to the wounded soldiers, and who cleaned up after the initial horror. I thoroughly intended to watch PBS's Civil War nursing drama Mercy Street , and then...I did not. But why watch an entertaining work of fiction when you can read a 250 page book about the true events it's based on? Like the series (apparently), the book focuses on the largest hospital in Alexandria, Virginia: Mansion House Hospital. Alexandria was the city occupied the longest by Union troops during the Civil War. It was so strategically placed, that less than 24 hours after Virginia seceded, Union troops crept in during the night and captured the city.  Something I had little...

It's hard to disconnect. It's hard not to be going somewhere with a purpose. But Keri Smith's The Wander Society encourages you to do just those things. It is a guide to wandering, to not filling your mind with anything but the impressions of your surroundings and the most unfocused of your thoughts.  I'm not going to say we live in an age unlike any other in this respect, because if we were 16th century merchants and you told us to take some time off from scurrying to and fro from spice house to textile shop, we'd wheel about on you angrily and tell you to make off with yourself. [Exit, pursued by a bear] We are like all humans have been for all of time. We focus on things in the future. We focus on things in the past. We run from task to task, and we don't let ourselves wander .  Penguin asked if I wanted to review The Wander Society and I said yes, definitely, for a number of reasons. 1. I like things that are ostensibly going to tell me how to ...

Opera is our most dramatic art form, and the most dramatic people within that art form are, arguably, sopranos.  ...yeah. Angels & Monsters covers the soprano from her operatic inception in the late 1590s to about 1900, giving the reader an overview of every major operatic period from the 16th to the 20th centuries, as well as brief biographies of the biggest players on the stage and how their relationships with the key composers of their eras. Handel, Mozart, Donizetti, Bellini, Beethoven, Massenet, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini are all covered, as well as many more, and all within about 300 pages. My primary knowledge concerning singers of the 19th century prior to this book came from a passing knowledge of some of their names, as well as information gleaned from a biography of Maria Malibran that intimated that opera singers were the rock stars of their time. "Their time" implying, I am aware, that that time is not now, proof of which I believe is e...