Blackout is the third book by Connie Willis about the Oxford History Department- which, by the 2060s, is able to send its graduate students physically into the past through a semi-reliable time machine. Polly, Eileen and Mike are all studying WWII England, meaning that not only is their thesis fieldwork very hands on, it's also very dangerous. Polly is studying the reaction of inner city Londoners during the first weeks of the Blitz. Eileen's studies of evacuated London children send her not only to a maid position in a country manor house but also into quarantine. Mike was planning to observe the Dunkirk soldier evacuations from the relatively safe distance of Dover, but he gets pulled into the middle of the action before he can escape. My main complaint about this well-researched book is that it starts up pretty slowly. It took me almost a hundred pages to get really committed (the book is nearly 500 pages long) but I did stick with it and once all the students have made it back to the past things pick up quickly. The story is absolutely packed with interesting details of daily life in WWII England. One warning: the ending of this book contains no resolution whatsoever, as it was originally only the first half of a book which was deemed too long by the editors and cut into two parts. The second half of the story can be found in the sequel All Clear.

The City: A Global History contains brief biographies of the world's largest and most influential cities, beginning in Babylonia and Mesopotamia and working all the way forward to Los Angelos. Kotkin lays out his theory of what constitutes a successful city: safe, busy, and containing a sacred space.

I kicked off my second re-reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories at the beginning with A Study in Scarlet. The story begins with the introduction of John Watson, a discharged army doctor recently wounded while serving in Afghanistan. His need for a flatmate leads him to Sherlock Holmes, the only consulting detective in London and the world. Before long Holmes is summoned to the scene of a horrific crime- an American dead, without a mark on his body, and the word Rache inscribed on the wall above him in blood. Watson is horrified, but this is only the beginning- the events that set this crime in motion began years ago and miles away in the deserts of Mormon Utah. The twists and turns of this Victorian tale are both outrageously strange and addictively clever.