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aaronj21's Reviews (912)
In a small island nominally owned by India, a tribe of hunter gatherers continue to live in much the same way people did before the advent of agriculture (scrap metal spear tips and arrowheads notwithstanding), aggressively isolationist, these people have consistently fought off any attempt by outsiders to land on their island.
The mere fact of these people’s existence and continued way of life is fascinating which may explain why some people are so dead set on making contact when contact is manifestly not something the islanders want. Yes, there was the imprudent American “missionary” who snuck onto the island only to be killed in 2018, but even during the reign of the British empire people were obsessed with visiting these people and interacting with them somehow.
This book, to my mind, was an informative overview of North Sentinel Island and the surrounding archipelago and its long and often bloody history with outsiders. The author did attempt to visit the island himself a few times but he doesn’t spend too much of the books page count going into his own story. This wise choice and the obviously competent writing make it an engaging read for anyone interested in the topic.
The mere fact of these people’s existence and continued way of life is fascinating which may explain why some people are so dead set on making contact when contact is manifestly not something the islanders want. Yes, there was the imprudent American “missionary” who snuck onto the island only to be killed in 2018, but even during the reign of the British empire people were obsessed with visiting these people and interacting with them somehow.
This book, to my mind, was an informative overview of North Sentinel Island and the surrounding archipelago and its long and often bloody history with outsiders. The author did attempt to visit the island himself a few times but he doesn’t spend too much of the books page count going into his own story. This wise choice and the obviously competent writing make it an engaging read for anyone interested in the topic.
Long before former president and convicted felon Donald Trump threatened to use nuclear weapons on Twitter, American presidents were using and misusing the threat of nuclear force. Far from being a cold, rational system, the mechanisms by which the commander in chief could actually use the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal have often been haphazard, cobbled together, and susceptible to mistakes. This book illustrates this fact from Truman to the Cuban Missile Crisis to North Korea, the history of how presidents think about and use “the bomb” has involved more than a few close calls and could probably do with some serious reconsideration.
Amanda H. Podany is a treasure. I have never read or listened to anyone quite as knowledgeable or enthused about ancient near eastern history as she is. I watched her lecture series on ancient Mesopotamia and learned so much, so naturally I had to read her newest book.
The title did not disappoint. I felt like it was getting a glimpse of real life thousands of years ago in the ancient cities of Ur, Uruk, and Nineveh. She covers the broad strokes of political life in the region but as the title promises, the lives of ordinary people are front and center as well. Ancient people, it turns out, were more similar to us than they were different. They worried about money, health, the safety of their loved ones, they planned for the future and enjoyed life when they could, drinking beer with friends or travelling to see family.
This book is the best kind of history book, one that informs, entertains, and shows you something you thought you knew all about from a fresh perspective.
The title did not disappoint. I felt like it was getting a glimpse of real life thousands of years ago in the ancient cities of Ur, Uruk, and Nineveh. She covers the broad strokes of political life in the region but as the title promises, the lives of ordinary people are front and center as well. Ancient people, it turns out, were more similar to us than they were different. They worried about money, health, the safety of their loved ones, they planned for the future and enjoyed life when they could, drinking beer with friends or travelling to see family.
This book is the best kind of history book, one that informs, entertains, and shows you something you thought you knew all about from a fresh perspective.
An incredibly specific story that lives in the same realm as Maurice and Brideshead Revisited, this play is interesting both on its own merits and as an artifact of its time and place. The play grapples with themes like class inequality, homosexuality, addiction, and hypocrisy in that staid and rigorously proper of settings, the British Public School. The characters play really well off each other and the dialogue is a masterclass in comedic timing and innuendo.
No one else writes British history like Alison Weir, she brings a surety and deftness to her writing that makes even the densest history easy to engage with.
In this book Weir gives each of Henry VIII’s unfortunate wives their due and shows them as vibrant women of their time and historical figures in their own right, not merely passive prizes controlled and acted upon by others.
In this book Weir gives each of Henry VIII’s unfortunate wives their due and shows them as vibrant women of their time and historical figures in their own right, not merely passive prizes controlled and acted upon by others.
While not as fun as Dr. Faustus (I mean, how could it be?) this play deserves the attention it gets and then some.
Not only does it depict an interesting turbulent period in English history, it’s also fascinating as a play about a probably homosexual king written by a playwright known to have had affairs with men. While the action stalls in several parts, that fact alone as well as some standout lines (“Why should you love him, whom the world hates so?” “Because he loves me more than all the world.”) make it a worthwhile classic.
Not only does it depict an interesting turbulent period in English history, it’s also fascinating as a play about a probably homosexual king written by a playwright known to have had affairs with men. While the action stalls in several parts, that fact alone as well as some standout lines (“Why should you love him, whom the world hates so?” “Because he loves me more than all the world.”) make it a worthwhile classic.
This ambitious book doesn’t quite lie up to the potential of its fascinating premise yet is engaging and brief enough to not make that shortcoming a major failing.
While I enjoyed this book I found myself wishing more of it was as insightful and nuanced as the introduction and epilogue. The body of the work, while informative, didn’t seem interested in analyzing these various American messianic figures or their commonalities, only with reporting their activities and beliefs. I believe this book could have been improved by the addition of even a brief analysis, perhaps at the end of each section, connecting each “messiah” to the larger messianic tradition and delving into the specific conditions that lead to the rise of each figure.
Reading this book filled me with enough incandescent rage to power a midsized costal city. I’d seen snippets of the HBO documentary, I’d seen YouTube videos, I *knew* this debacle was a massive miscarriage of justice. But there’s knowing and then there’s reading about it in minute detail, beat by beat, for 400ish pages.
For all the rock dwellers out there; this book covers a gruesome triple child homicide in the early 90’s, the…let’s say unusual police investigation that followed, and the subsequent trial and conviction of three teenagers based on nothing more than a single coerced “confession” and a handful of circumstantial evidence. If this sounds unbelievably awful that’s because it is.
The author does a phenomenal job handling the material. It’s difficult to think of a more upsetting topic but an air of tact, relative objectivity, and pursuit of the facts permeates the writing. I say relative objectivity because of course the writer has an opinion on the case, how could anyone not? Despite this, Leveritt refrains from making pronouncements or even claims, she lets the evidence, testimony, and particulars of the case speak for themselves. What she’s able to show is a massively compromised investigation from beginning to end. The author also shows a clear pattern of law enforcement seeking only the evidence that fits into their theory (that the murders were tied to a satanic cult of which Damien Echols was a participant) rather than suiting their theories to conform to the evidence. This bias runs so deep that officers fail to investigate someone who should have at least been a suspect, John Mark Byers, one of the murdered boy’s stepfathers. Byers had a history of crime and violence against family members and his alibi for the time of the murders had numerous inconsistencies. But despite these and other glaring red flags he was never considered a suspect nor interrogated. Indeed, the few times officers did speak with him their tone was apologetic, almost fawning, a sharp contrast from the rough tactics used on the teenage suspects they eventually arrest for the murders.
This pervasive bias extends to the courtroom too and the author shows in striking detail the many ways in which these accused did not receive a truly fair trial. In just one of dozens examples, the prosecution is allowed to call an “expert witness” whose only credentials come from a correspondence course he took on “occult activity” meanwhile the defense is forbidden from having one of their expert witness state his opinion that one of the boy’s confessions was coerced rather than voluntary.
This whole case is a twisted, murky, infuriating mess, a labyrinth of bias, misconduct, and abuse of authority at all possible levels. But this book does an excellent job of taking these mountains of information and synthesizing them into a single coherent and compelling narrative. This book is a difficult one, it will educate you, it will upset and enrage you, but you should let it. this is, I believe, a challenging but ultimately important non-fiction book.
For all the rock dwellers out there; this book covers a gruesome triple child homicide in the early 90’s, the…let’s say unusual police investigation that followed, and the subsequent trial and conviction of three teenagers based on nothing more than a single coerced “confession” and a handful of circumstantial evidence. If this sounds unbelievably awful that’s because it is.
The author does a phenomenal job handling the material. It’s difficult to think of a more upsetting topic but an air of tact, relative objectivity, and pursuit of the facts permeates the writing. I say relative objectivity because of course the writer has an opinion on the case, how could anyone not? Despite this, Leveritt refrains from making pronouncements or even claims, she lets the evidence, testimony, and particulars of the case speak for themselves. What she’s able to show is a massively compromised investigation from beginning to end. The author also shows a clear pattern of law enforcement seeking only the evidence that fits into their theory (that the murders were tied to a satanic cult of which Damien Echols was a participant) rather than suiting their theories to conform to the evidence. This bias runs so deep that officers fail to investigate someone who should have at least been a suspect, John Mark Byers, one of the murdered boy’s stepfathers. Byers had a history of crime and violence against family members and his alibi for the time of the murders had numerous inconsistencies. But despite these and other glaring red flags he was never considered a suspect nor interrogated. Indeed, the few times officers did speak with him their tone was apologetic, almost fawning, a sharp contrast from the rough tactics used on the teenage suspects they eventually arrest for the murders.
This pervasive bias extends to the courtroom too and the author shows in striking detail the many ways in which these accused did not receive a truly fair trial. In just one of dozens examples, the prosecution is allowed to call an “expert witness” whose only credentials come from a correspondence course he took on “occult activity” meanwhile the defense is forbidden from having one of their expert witness state his opinion that one of the boy’s confessions was coerced rather than voluntary.
This whole case is a twisted, murky, infuriating mess, a labyrinth of bias, misconduct, and abuse of authority at all possible levels. But this book does an excellent job of taking these mountains of information and synthesizing them into a single coherent and compelling narrative. This book is a difficult one, it will educate you, it will upset and enrage you, but you should let it. this is, I believe, a challenging but ultimately important non-fiction book.
Nowhere is the creepy, shocking, read-it-in-one-sitting-because-you-can’t-put-it-down, horror novel you’ve been waiting on. If you like horror, especially horror set in Appalachia, you need to get your hands on this book yesterday.
The premise of the story is Rachel Kennan, a hardened, rough edged cop from Richmond moves her family to the middle of nowhere Dalmouth Virginia to become the town’s new chief of police. Her family are a little less than ordinary and are immediately seen as interlopers in the small, tight knit community. When the book opens our protagonist has her career, family life, and sanity all hanging by a single slender thread, not to mention her struggles with embracing her hidden sexuality.
Things get even worse when a grotesquely mutilated body is discovered in the woods and something strange begins happening to the children of Dalmouth, including Rachel’s own girls…
I won’t veer into spoiler territory here because I think this book is good enough that everyone needs to experience it for themselves. I will however discuss my impressions of the book in general terms.
Right from the beginning this book had an easy to read, cinematic quality that reminded me favorably of S.A. Cosby’s phenomenal book Razorbalde Tears. From the start I could see the story unfolding in my mind with granular clarity and detail and could follow along easily with the well-paced action and exposition. The characters are also extremely vivid. Rachel especially is just the kind of complex, imperfect, messy person I absolutely love to read about. Her interactions with her husband Finn, a onetime writer now a hollow shell of himself, felt compelling and understandable without necessarily being positive or healthy. She’s the kind of character you can’t help but be charmed by even as she makes mistake after mistake. The characters adapt and change too, they don’t remain static in throughout the horrific events of the story, a shortcoming that’s all too prevalent in horror fiction. I don’t buy it when characters go through some of the most terrifying stuff imaginable and then stay completely unchanged as a person.
And the horror, oh my god the horror. This book is actually scary on so many levels! There are shocks, grotesque body horror, and some more lingering terror on a deeper, cosmic level as well. I love when a story manages to play on different levels of fear and this book certainly delivers on that. While death and supernatural creatures are certainly alarming, sometimes the most frightening thing of all is the darkness lurking dormant in ordinary people, the everyday sort of monstrousness in our friends and neighbors.
There is something gratifying about seeing the beginning of something and that’s just the sense I got when reading this debut novel. I felt like I was present to see the start of unique and compelling voice in fiction. The style of this book reads as if Paul Tremblay and S.A. Cosby collaborated while also having a unique tone quite distinct from either of those authors.
Not only will I read anything else this author writes, I’ll await any future titles with the eager anticipation.
The premise of the story is Rachel Kennan, a hardened, rough edged cop from Richmond moves her family to the middle of nowhere Dalmouth Virginia to become the town’s new chief of police. Her family are a little less than ordinary and are immediately seen as interlopers in the small, tight knit community. When the book opens our protagonist has her career, family life, and sanity all hanging by a single slender thread, not to mention her struggles with embracing her hidden sexuality.
Things get even worse when a grotesquely mutilated body is discovered in the woods and something strange begins happening to the children of Dalmouth, including Rachel’s own girls…
I won’t veer into spoiler territory here because I think this book is good enough that everyone needs to experience it for themselves. I will however discuss my impressions of the book in general terms.
Right from the beginning this book had an easy to read, cinematic quality that reminded me favorably of S.A. Cosby’s phenomenal book Razorbalde Tears. From the start I could see the story unfolding in my mind with granular clarity and detail and could follow along easily with the well-paced action and exposition. The characters are also extremely vivid. Rachel especially is just the kind of complex, imperfect, messy person I absolutely love to read about. Her interactions with her husband Finn, a onetime writer now a hollow shell of himself, felt compelling and understandable without necessarily being positive or healthy. She’s the kind of character you can’t help but be charmed by even as she makes mistake after mistake. The characters adapt and change too, they don’t remain static in throughout the horrific events of the story, a shortcoming that’s all too prevalent in horror fiction. I don’t buy it when characters go through some of the most terrifying stuff imaginable and then stay completely unchanged as a person.
And the horror, oh my god the horror. This book is actually scary on so many levels! There are shocks, grotesque body horror, and some more lingering terror on a deeper, cosmic level as well. I love when a story manages to play on different levels of fear and this book certainly delivers on that. While death and supernatural creatures are certainly alarming, sometimes the most frightening thing of all is the darkness lurking dormant in ordinary people, the everyday sort of monstrousness in our friends and neighbors.
There is something gratifying about seeing the beginning of something and that’s just the sense I got when reading this debut novel. I felt like I was present to see the start of unique and compelling voice in fiction. The style of this book reads as if Paul Tremblay and S.A. Cosby collaborated while also having a unique tone quite distinct from either of those authors.
Not only will I read anything else this author writes, I’ll await any future titles with the eager anticipation.