History Books

I would think that Marx has had both good and bad rep and that his detractors and fans have taken his legacy further than it deserved. So how should he be viewed? I submit that there are 4 ways to do so and all of them are mutually important. They are 1) Economic, 2) Intellectual, 3) Political and 4) Moral.

Marx based his economic views on the premise that all value of a good produced comes from the labor that goes into it. Intuitively this seems wrong. What of the capital, management, demand (by the way Marx does not like the idea of supply and demand either) etc. Our experience shows that all of these and more play a role in determining what value a thing has. Iteratively the Marxist model of economy then suffers from its imperfect premise. His contention of lack of sustainable profits etc make sense if you agree with his premise but that is not how it shapes out in the modern World. All in all it seems that Marx misses the point about how economy works, and given his incredible intelligence, you wonder why.

I think the reason is in the intellectual workings of his mind. Now it appears that most of human experience happens in shades of gray or on a spectrum. Very few things actually are definite "this or that". This is particularly true of psychology, sociology and also economics. Perhaps the very fact that so many variables come to bear on any given situation that it would be impossible to reproduce that situation again reliably. Hence much of these fields are understood along a spectrum and minor variation in observation is to be expected from event to event and from time to time. Unfortunately many people tend to think of the World as an absolute. For this, against that, regardless of the circumstances (abortion, death penalty, taxes etc come to mind). Marx takes the notion of value of labor from Adam Smith and particularly David Ricardo and fixates upon it as the only determinant of value of a good. Intellectually it boxes him in an inflexible position where he has to stick to his position. Eventually this inflexibility dooms him.

Marx built upon his economic position to develop a political scenario that just did not happen - not sustainably. I think here the folly is not that the position was wrong but rather that when he makes his predictions: "....exploiters will be expropriated ...", he never says how it would come about. This would not be so bad if more of his writings actually had some sort of road map of how you get to this utopia, but they don't.

Finally, is he as bad as I have made him out to be? Well, you be the judge. This is a man writing at the tail end of the initial experience of the industrial revolution. He devotes a large part of Capital to vivid descriptions of young children being dragged out of bed at 2 and 3 in the morning to work in horrible factories, of starving mothers giving up their children to horrendous working conditions in phosphorus match factories where they would die within a few years or were horribly afflicted, of terrible lung diseases in potters or resistance to reducing the average work day to a mere 18 hours. He sees all these and cries out. What follows may be flawed but is grounded in a deep human sympathy. And his experience resonates today with us when we think that perhaps the working poor ought to at least get a living wage, or people must not have to make a decision between rent and medicines and children ought not to die because access of healthcare was not affordable.

I think it was the poor French philosopher Althusser who claimed that Marx had discovered a new continent of thought called "history" equivalent to the continents of thought discovered by Pythagoras (geometry) and Aristotle (science). I would use a different metaphor. It is as if Marx invented a pair of x-ray glasses that allows you the viewer to see the exploitation hidden in every commodity, no matter how beautifully it is packaged. I guess the only book it is really comparable to would be the Bible, edited and created in the year 207 by the North African Roman citizen Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus. On the narrative level the books are quite opposite. The one starts with a single savior who comes to save the world, but ends up being exploited, abused and killed, thus needing saving, the other starts with a class that is exploited, abused and killed, but ends up saving the world. Of the two, Marx is definitely the more optimistic view. But if we could resurrect Marx as we resurrected Jesus, would he still have his optimism?

"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward." --Vernon Sanders Law.

When reading the title, The Starbucks Experience, a reader could take it one of two ways: a story about the experience of Starbucks as a company, or the story of the experience that Starbucks sells to its customers. I took it as the latter but in any case author Joseph A. Michelli presents valuable lessons for business.

These lessons can be distilled down to his five principles that he uses to describe Starbucks: Make It Your Own, Everything Matters, Surprise and Delight, Embrace Resistance, and Leave Your Mark.

Each of these principles is discussed in a chapter of its own. An "Introduction" and "Final Word" help to frame the discussion: understanding that while Starbucks is not perfect, it is clearly a huge success, and that what follows is an attempt to describe what Starbucks does well--being Starbucks--and how that translates into a strong connection to its customer base.

In roughly 180 pages, Michelli guides the reader through each of these principles, describing what it means with a rich tapestry of anecdotes. Using insets labeled "Create Your Own Experience" and "Ideas to Sip On," Michelli encourages the reader to reflect upon the material and to make application.

Whether you're a fan of Starbucks is immaterial; this "skinny half-caf" book is an effective presentation of what has made Starbucks so successful at selling what has become an everyday luxury.

OK a friend gave me this book. I'm not a coffee drinker and dont really care to be one, so I was thinking well this book isn't going to have anything for me. Boy was I wrong....
This book is very well written, the author uses actually illistrations to point out how great of a company Starbucks is. This book shows how it views its employees (partners), how is views society, and how they want Starbucks to be more about people then selling coffee.
I find myself wanting to quit my job and take the pay cut to go and serve coffee.
This books has also been showing me how to be a good manager and how to really try to be a better employee.

This is a great book for business leaders looking for new ideas and strategies to implement into their business and for those who want to learn a little more about the business principals that Starbucks is founded on.

Michelli offers many examples and case studies throughout the book and includes thought provoking "create your own experience" and "thoughts to sip on" to help the reader implement ideas into their own business practices. The Starbucks Experience offers an in-depth look at the Company's branded customer service over the years.

This book is packed with useful information and ideas. I was pleasantly surprised by the high standards that Starbucks follows; from the way employees are treated to the environmental efforts, and much more. The only weakness is that the examples do get a little repetitive, as the same kinds of principals are emphasized over and over.

Samantha Marroquin
[...]

While the author ends his introduction stating that he is "not here to sell you on the company" or "not here to convince you that Starbucks is one of the best global business enterprises", it's hard to read the next 181 pages without thinking that that's exactly what he's doing.

If you're a Starbucks fan(atic) then this is a wonderful book to make yourself feel good and make the Starbucks PR team very happy.

As a business book with "keen insight on the transformational power of Starbucks" (as the dust cover teases) then it leaves a lot to be desired.

Other reviews have dealt at length with the ideas presented in this book, and I won't belabor them here. While Starbucks sounds like a visionary company, and its philosophy is presented in a clear, easy-to-follow format, the writing makes "The Starbucks Experience" difficult to slog through. This is not unusual in motivational books I've read--those by Stephen Covey and Patrick Lencioni spring immediately to mind (why is it that books dedicated to excellence don't seem to attract editors with a concomitant commitment?). Mr. Michelli has rounded up the requisite supply of raves from other motivational-book authors, and if you liked Covey and Lencioni, you'll probably love him. If not, though, be prepared to grit your teeth. Memo to Mr. Michelli: it may be acceptable to use Starbucks as an adjective (and therefore with no apostrophe) in phrases like "Starbucks leadership" and "Starbucks partners," but it is NOT in phrases that are clearly possessive, such as "Starbucks [sic] rapid growth." Your decision to simply abandon the use of apostrophes throughout, rather than find an editor who knows how to punctuate, was not well taken.

"The Starbucks Experience" has a few memorable and excellent anecdotes, others that are deceptively simple, and still others that are just simplistic, period. Like the little girl with the curl, when it's good, it's very, very good, and when it's bad, it's, um, not so good.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in sociology. It is an easy read, interesting, and easy to follow.

This text book is very basic, but it is good at covering the basic principles of Sociology. Reading this text book would pretty much have you covered for a Soc 101 course. Anything beyond that you would need extra reading material.

Not sure how I ordered this book. I remember looking up the info on this book but not ordering it. It didn't cost but a few dollars, but it was useless to my daughter. It didn't include what was to be InfoTrac.

This is a great book to learn about cultures and the way society runs. I have learned so much from this book, it's unbelieveable. It has a non-objective view point on every topic, and contains quotes and sources for everything Ferrante writes. It's very easy to read and very well written! A WONDERFUL book!

lots of short essays, interesting stuff...biased viewpoint..its great!

be sure to check out hammurabis code

This coffee table book is one of my favorites. It doesn't go in depth into the subject matter but rather grazes over real-world examples with diagrams and simple explanations. Fun book to read, but not for the serious of study.

Want to be better or the best at what you do? This is the kind of book you use to fuel inspiration at a foundational level.

It was very fast to get the product and I experience a very good seller!

I bought this book primarily to see the studies of proportions in architecture. There are very few examples (really only 4 pages dedicated to that subject and 3 buildings analyzed) shown here. It does, however, give a myriad of ways to lay out different proportions using rectangles, circles, triangles, pentagons, etc. These, along with the examples of proportion in nature and on the human body were enough to spark my imagination as to how proportion can be used in design of buildings, but if you are looking for broad analysis of architectural proportions, look elsewhere. The examples that are given are mainly of poster design in the 1900s and Modern furniture design.

Kim Elam's book is not only a fascinating read, but beautifully designed as well, making it a perfect example of its subject. A must for all artists and designers.

Very easy explanation in book.........dont try to read whole book otherwise you will get sleep

Got this book as well as Volume I and used them as my resources for taking the Western Civ I and II CLEPS. Perfect for the job, and helped me get a very good grade, highly recommend for anyone looking to use for that purpose.

This book was horrible for AP Euro, it was not in chronological order and often confused our class. Also, he skipped over some events that were important to know for the AP exam.

Jackson J. Spielvogel has no sense of organization whatsoever. And as for those people who read this book for fun, SERIOUSLY need a life. I, however, am using this book as a text book for AP Euro and think it is absolutely ludicrous that we have to use it. It's confusing and needs to be written better. A LOT better. This book should get -1000000 stars.

After being required to read this text for a class, I bought two other history books to which I could compare this one. I thought that Spielvogel was leaving out chunks of history, and revising the ones that he included, and I wanted to double check my facts before making any accusations. Well, boy was I right. This book makes the Publisher's tag line, "Changing the Way the World Learns" seem a little too true..

If you DO get this book, here are some things to look out for:

1. He is wrong on just about everything that has to do with art or music. He cites obscure artists and names them as the most popular, most of them had Christian themed work.

2. He glorifies Hitler and the Nazis and makes the Holocaust seem like nothing but a minor glitch in history.

3. The author has a degree in Reformation History and seems to be unable to help himself from relating every single event in history to religion. So keep in mind that Voltaire had more to offer history than an anti-Christian revisionist account of the fall of the Roman Empire, as Spielvogel states.

If I were you, I'd buy a different history book to read as well as this one, if this is required for a course. Preferably one that was published for the first time in the thirties or forties and has been updated since, so that its more clear it isn't revionist history. This one was first published in 2003.

Honestly, if I could give this book less than one star I would, but there's no such option on amazon.com...

Peter Hessler is today a well known American correspondent and free lance journalist living in Beijing. He has written two books and many articles on modern China and can be defined ad an "Old China hand", an honorary title given to Chinese speaking foreigners who truly understand the country, which even in this era of globalization knows how to keep many of its secrets.
River Town was published in 2001, after a two year experience (1996-1998) as a Peace Corps English teacher in Sichuanese Fuling, a city on the Yangtze River that has since been transformed by the Three Gorges Dam activated in 2003.
The book is a Bildungsroman or better "Bildungsmemoir" centered on the relationship that builds up between a man and a country. Even though many other have lived through similar experiences, no one has attempted the same type of identification and empathic comprehension of the impacted culture or has shown the honesty of this Author. In some ways he reminds us of Hearn, the American who became Japanese in the Nineteenth Century.
Young Peter in over 400 pages goes through cultural shock, frustration of being seen as a "waigouren" (foreigner), true episodes of physical and verbal aggression, great satisfaction in his teaching experience of mostly peasant born college students, a moment of glory during a 4 km race and basically all his life experiences in two years. But the main characteristics that make this book such a joy to read are the Authors curiosity, honesty, irony, all signs of his great intelligence and the precise rendition of the sense of place and of the Chinese mentality in all its hues. The impression is that of living with a friend. However the book is also a travelogue and a socialogue because it goes into the geography, landscapes, historical sites and history of Sichuan, the Yangtze River and a few other places visited in China during the two years, together with the analysis of the rapidly transforming Chinese society. These aspects are very interesting and make the book especially valuable, since the Yangtze River region and population have changed from the activation of the Three Gorges Dam. This longstanding important landscape modifying project is explained and described in depth, evaluating the pro's and con's considering also the Fuling's inhabitants surprisingly calm and passive reaction to this epochal transformation. At one point Hessler visits the Water Crane Ridge an important Tang Dynasty monument and a landscape mark that today is completely underwater and in a few years will be destroyed by the river sediments.
Since other reviewers have inserted personal reasons for relating to the book. I want to communicate a very personal reason. Hessler tells of how his grandfather, then a Benedictine monk, went to Rome to study in the S. Anselm Abbey and he met a monk returning from China who inflamed his spirit with the wish of working there. Well I live right next to the Abbey and daily see monks from all over the world that carry stories of other countries.
Another episode that remains in my memory is when Hessler's visiting father speaks Latin (the last Century's pass partout language) with the Chinese priest and he is excluded from the conversation. There is a similar beautiful episode in Primo Levi's "The Truce" were the Author liberated from concentration camp after WWII, not knowing the language of the country he is traveling through can only communicate with a priest in Latin asking for something to eat.
Communication is a guideline of this beautiful book: English/Chinese, Chinese/English, Latin/Chinese, through the teaching of literature (do the Chinese identify or understand Hamlet? They don't. What if Robin Hood came to China? Redistribution of riches and justice is rather complicated.) and theatre (Shakespeare's plays re-enacted in China). The endless conversations, sitting in parks and in restaurants, striking up a discussion in trains and during trekking in the hills, relating life stories of the many people he met all build up the texture of the book. What comes through as we get to know Hessler is his determination, honesty and the satisfaction of his success in mastering the language.
I really loved this book and I recommend reading Hessler's other book "Oracle Bones" and his many articles that can be found on line (one of them on China's perspective on Tibet is really mind opening).

Reading this narrative, one feels a sense of both Mr. Hessler's sense of adverture and his eye for detail in all things. His sense of humor is crisp and dry. Having just returned from China myself, I can vouch for his extraordinarily accurate descriptions,even in spots where the armchair traveller would shake his head in disbelief. And I was immediately transported back to the Yangtze River--I could smell it, see it, and observe the uniquely Chinese character of everything around. His ability to capture the essence of Chinese personality and expression while avoiding stereotype is amazing. When I left, I thought that there was something, well, different about all Chinese, not a racial thing but a cultural and perhaps historical thing. But I could not really say what it was. Fortunately for me and for all readers who enjoy travel and cultural subjects, there is this book.

Hessler writes candidly about his experiences in China as if he were writing to a friend back home. His accounts of conversations between himself and the locals are priceless, both funny and sad. This book really brings to light the hardships of Chinese farmers and their children, who seek to escape their rural lives by getting an education and joining the Communist Party.

Hessler's self-deprecating tone and funny anecdotes about his cultural mishaps make this book entertaining and touching. I strongly recommend it for anyone who wants to visit China or is interested in learning more about what makes this complex society tick.

Interesting peek into Chinese life. Four stars because I left wishing for something a bit deeper. Highly recommended.

Hessler's writing is a joy to read. His dry wit reminded me, somehow, of Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Except that Hessler's irony is friendly and warm whereas Heller's brilliance was cynical and ruthless.

Hessler does an excellent job of providing details to a story that get you to feel what he was feeling, rather than trying to tell you how he was feeling. And his stories about having the same conversations over and over reminded me of my own travels abroad, and the split personality that one does develop as a not unpleasant coping mechanism.

In addition to superb, reflective writing, Hessler conveys the peculiarities of Sichuan life with an affectionate tone. I look forward to reading his "Oracle Bones".

Quicksilver was exactly what I was looking for this summer, it was in fact more than I'd hoped for.

I am someone who doesn't like to read, just to read. I like to learn while I read. I read mostly historical fiction books, mixed with some pure fiction and lots of travel narratives. The Baroque Cycle has taken my love of history and travel and merged it into this beautiful, sometimes "seemingly" rambling, but always coherent masterpiece. There is no doubt that this is a long book. And it isn't "always" tight and interesting. It floats around a lot and I found myself reading several pages and wondering how the heck they got from one place to the next without any mention of the character moving from one locale to the other. But it works. Because even though this can be droll and long winded, this is the only way a book like this could have been written.

It reminds me of Amadeus. The 80s movie. The King of Austria is looking at Mozart after one of his operas and the king says "it has too many notes." To this, Mozart says, and I'm paraphrasing, "it has as many notes as is required. No more, no less." And this is the way I felt about Quicksilver. It doesn't have any more words than are needed in order to convey the time, the language, the monetary system, the thought and feelings of the characters, etc. It just so happens that it takes a lot of verbiage to describe these things. But Neal does it perfectly.

It is gaining ground as my favorite book/books of all time especially as I enter The Confusion. I look forward to the next 2,000 pages a great deal!

I highly recommend this long, gorgeous journey that is The Baroque Cycle.

This review will be much briefer than the actual book. If you are a fan of Neal Stephenson, then by all means pick up this book. If you are not yet acquainted with Neal Stephenson's work, then I suggest reading Snowcrash or especially Cryptonomicon as your first Stephenson books.

In a nutshell, Quicksilver and the subsequent books are sort of a family history of the Waterhouse and Shaftoe clans and their interrelation, and serves as a sort of prequel to Cryptonomicon. However, reading the Baroque Cycle is not necessary to enjoy Cryptonomicon.

Set during the late 17th and early 18th centuries the plot revolves around, among other things, the two Shaftoe brothers, Bob and Jack, a soldier and a vagabond; Daniel Waterhouse, friend to Isaac Newton, Natural Philosopher and member of the Royal Society; and Eliza, a former slave who rises to nobility while spying for William of Orange and brokering various financial transactions. All of this takes place during the period of European History plagued by, well, the Black Plague, Cromwell's conquering and losing of the English Crown, Louis XIV's reign in France and various other historical events.

It is an interesting story with sex, violence and intrigue, but it moves slowly at times and the lengthy sections of correspondence between Eliza and various other characters slows the pace down even further. But all in all, if historical fiction is something that interests you, then at the very least you should check it out of the library or borrow it from a friend and take it for a test drive before actually buying it.

(Spoiler warning!)

I read and absolutely loved The Cryptonomicon. I had high hopes for Quicksilver but alas I was disappointed. While written in the same style as the Cryptonomicon the threads are too nebulous and fluid.

An example is that there's a lengthly section about silver mining and how a Natural Philosopher (scientist) and the enigmatic Enoch Root discover a way to economically coax silver from silver mine dregs. So the group travels to Amsterdam (or someplace, I forget) to get mercury, a necessary ingredient for the silver reclamation process. We never hear about it again, except for a single one-line reference 100 pages later.

The book is full of threads like this that go nowhere or are too subtle for my limited intellect.

Quicksilver just didn't gel for me.

I think if I was reading this book instead of listening to it on CD I would never have finished it. However, the voice talent on the CD takes the meandering aimless plot (can you even say it has a plot?) and makes it a very entertaining experience. The voice talent, able to nail almost all the British and European accents along with their perfect timing for the dusty dry humor that Neal writes, has made this book on CD a very worthwhile experience. And I have always been a sucker for books that include the history of science. Every chapter has an interesting science history fact or two along with the author bringing out many unusual details of life in the late 1600s and early 1700s.

Eric Larson has an almost lyrical voice for historical non-fiction storytelling presenting historical fact in a style generally associated with works of fiction. After reading Larson's Devil In The White City, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America I was excited to get my hands on Thunderstruck. It was a disappointment. Larson chose Edwardian England and the dawning of the 20th century as the backdrop for his tale The period was ripe with growth and discovery. There was an innocence lost as, still reeling from the White Chapel murders, Londoners feared Jack the Ripper around every corner.

From this period of the dawning of the technical age, Eric Larson plucks two intriguing tales, each an enthralling bit of history in its own right. The first of these is Marconi's development of wireless communication. Larson skillfully lays out Marconi's life from childhood in Italy, his lack of formal education, his Irish mother's insistance that young Guglielmo learn English even at the expense of his native Italian, his eventual migration to England, his obsession with wireless communication, his lack of social savvy and the resultant failure of his romantic relationships.

And, while Larson unravels a tale of Marconi bouncing back and forth across the Atlantic in multiple failed attempts to transmit and receive timely wireless messages between Europe and North America he introduces a little known, but pivotal character in history ... Hawley Harvey Crippen.

Crippen, a mousey, bespectacled, little American, had the misfortune of marrying a young woman with loose social graces and high hopes. Their story follows the couple's circuitous and often tumultuous journey from America to England Where Mrs. Crippen, a failed actress in America believes she can find a better audience for her mediocre talents. She changes her name to Belle and, for a short time, becomes the belle of third class salons (theatres) about London. Although a failure as and actress, her exuberant personality makes her a darling among the theatre set nonetheless. But Belle's charm does not extend to her husband. She attempts to remake Hawley into her concept of what he should be, buying all of his clothes, orchestrating his life, and even renaming him Peter. Her own personal insecurities require him to be at her beckon call accounting for every moment he is not with her.

But, in the office of his patent medicine business, Hawley hires a secretary, Ethel La Neve, with whom he develops a romantic relationship. Bolstered by his romance with Ethel, Hawley stops worrying over Belle's threats to leave him. And, when one day she turns up missing, he explains her absence with a story of flight to America. But, before long he offers reports of Belle falling ill and, later, succumbing to her illness, and her friends start to question his story. When the theatre guild ladies go to the police, Hawley's cover begins to disintegrate and a global manhunt begins. Hawley and Ethel take flight, eventually boarding a ship in the Nederlands headed for America.

By this time, Marconi's wireless has found technical if not financial success as Marconi continues struggling to prove its worth and overcome competition from others working on similar radio wave advancements as well as the established cablegram. And the Marconigram proves to be the undoing of Hawley and Ethel when reports explode in the air with every snap of the telegrapher's signal on land and aboard ships crossing the Atlantic. When the lovers arrive in America, Assistant Commissioner McNaughton of Scotland Yard is there ahead of them.

Larson takes these two individually fascinating tales and, based on the one slender common link, attempts to intertwine them into one story. It seems almost as though he randomly interspersed chapters of two different short stories to make it big enough to call it a book. The result is a mish-mash of confusing chapters that flip-flop from one story to the other with no apparent connection, leaving the reader in a state of confusion with each new chapter.

I found myself being thrust out of the stories with every chapter, my mind doing a double-take at each new beginning, having to stop and review what I just read and trying to acclimate myself to the next chapter and the next. The ultimate effect is a sense of disequilibrium leading to a wholly unsatisfying reading experience and the most disconcerting fact is that Larson is far too forgiving of his own shortcomings in this book.

Despite the technical failure of Thunderstruck, however, I am sufficiently impressed with Larson's writing skills to want to read more of his non-fiction novels: Isaac's StormIsaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History; An Act of VengeanceAn Act of Vengeance; and even Lethal Passage Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun which is more a cry for social awareness than a simple historical tale.

Thunderstruck is well worth the read if only for the historical information it imparts. But, if you've not read any of Larson's work, Thunderstruck is not the place to begin. I would recommend,instead, Devil in the White City. And, when you do read Thunderstruck, be aware of its shortcomings.

This is not a quick, easy read. This one takes a lot of concentration, yet it was very interesting. History buffs will love it.

Larson seems to have devised a genre or writing style of his own making with this book and his earlier bestseller "Devil in the White City." The two works are similar in that they both tell the intersecting stories of a creator and a destroyer. In "White City," it was the architect Daniel Burnham and the serial killer H.H. Holmes whose stories were told in alternating chapters; in "Thunderstruck," it's the stories of Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of wireless telegraphy, and suspected killer H.H. Crippen which are alternated until they intersect. The similarity of style between the two books is so uncanny that it could not be chance; Larson has intentionally created a "genre" of sorts for himself.

This one is perhaps even better than "White City." Marconi is infinitely more interesting than Burnham, and his creation is more interesting than the latter's architecture. Crippen is more of a sympathetic character than H.H. Holmes, although the latter is perhaps more fascinating because of his much higher body count. It's almost a wash between the two books, and I daresay fans of the earlier book will be pleased with this one, too. Personally, I've really been enjoying these "turn-of-the-century true crime books" (as I classify them), whether by Larson or others.

One more thing: persevere. The first 100 expository pages may drag, but soon you learn to care for the principals and the book then begins to really move. Stick with it.

If you are interested in the history of radio, or British/Italian/American history circa 1900, this is really worth your perusal. The main characters, Marconi and Crippen, have absolutely nothing in common but fate. Follow their seemingly unconnected lives to the climax of this book and you will be privy to an intriguing example of how odd twists and turns can affect all of us. Nice piece of writing!

Not quite as good as Devil in the White City, but a satisfying read anyway. Learned more than I ever thought I would about Marconi and the wireless--fascinating period in history. The book includes excellent notes, ideas for further reading.