Reviews
City of Sedition
I keep thinking I’ll take a break from the American Civil War, but it just keeps shoving itself in my face. And so I keep shoving it in yours. I recently finished an extraordinary book. It had me writing notes to myself in the margins: “check what [someone else] has to say, “compare to X”,…
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One House, Five Families and 100 Years of German History
In The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History, Thomas Harding* tells the history of twentieth century Germany through the lens of a small vacation home, located on a lake near the outskirts of Berlin, and the five families who owned it. Harding is not an impartial…
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Brunelleschi’s Dome
The architecture book is done. While I was working on it, I wouldn’t have said it was fun. (My Own True Love will corroborate this.) I put in a lot of late nights. I struggled to find a simple way to describe how an arch works.* But along the way I re-read some old favorites,…
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