NY: Abrams, 2009.
I have a bright adolescent granddaughter who can’t imagine there was ever a world in which music came from flat plastic discs, or that telephones tethered you to the wall, or that a flashlight was too large to dangle from the zipper of your bookbag, or that car windows once had to be cranked up and down by hand.
Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005. [orig. publ. in Munich, 2003]
Aerial photographs began being taken in the mid-19th century, from tethered hot-air balloons, but it was a very iffy business. Among other things, the balloon gondola had to include a darkroom because the glass plates of the time couldn’t wait the photographer to return to earth. The invention of the airplane in the early 20th century made things much simpler in a technical sense, but also more complicated when it came to politics and borders.
London: Cassell, 2000.
The author’s Life in the English Country House has become a classic of domestic anthropology, an examination of the British aristocracy and landed gentry through an exploration of its preferred places of residence. When I became aware of this successor volume (it’s not a “sequel”) shortly after it first appeared, I had my doubts.
London: Little, Brown, 1981.
This large and lavishly illustrated volume is amazingly comprehensive. It’s just what the title says — a guide to uniforms and insignia (but not weapons or equipment, except incidentally), and to the Order of Battle of each of the nations that took part in the war, on both sides. It’s sort of the thing one would expect from Osprey, only much more so.
(Men-at-Arms series, 70) London: Osprey Publishing, 1985.
The volumes in this series generally mix campaign history (and the context of a war as a whole) with commentary on weapons, uniforms, and equipment. And Katcher is a very experienced military historian who generally does exactly that.
NY: HarperCollins, 2011.
This thing is 13 by 10 inches, more than 500 pages thick, and weighs enough to require both hands (and will put your legs to sleep if you try to read it in your lap). It’s also not cheap. But if you’re a Harry Potter fan, especially of the films — and I am — you should buy it and have a special stand made for it in your library.
NY: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988.
I had read several of Baker’s short stories in the New Yorker when he reworked a couple of them into this novel, and I’ve read everything he’s written since. Partly, it’s because I guess I identify with his somewhat obsessive/compulsive attention to everyday detail in the world around him.
NY: Rizzoli, 2009.
Country Life magazine was founded in 1897 and in every issue since then it has featured, in glorious photographic detail, one or another of England’s rural homes. Moreover, the editors have concentrated not on “greatly stately piles and ducal palaces,” as Miers calls them, but on actual residences still inhabited by actual families — often the descendants of the original folks who built them many centuries ago.
NY: Little, Brown, 2009.
Writing an essay is quite a different skill from creating a novel or a book-length nonfiction monograph, and Gladwell is a master of it. He’s been writing for The New Yorker since 1996 and this volume, his fourth, brings together some of his best work published there during the past fifteen years.
NY: Thames & Hudson, 1987.
In Britain, urban historians and architects have generally been able to classify conglomerations of people by size. At the top, historically, were a few large cities, such as Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh, and especially London, which was always in a class by itself. At the bottom were thousands of villages and hamlets, established close to the land their inhabitants worked.
As a retired public librarian (very large system in a very large city), I've been writing book reviews for the consumption of other people for more than 40 years. Since 1999, I've been posting my reviews to a personal website, but I'm now shifting my reviewing jones to this blog.
I have been a semi-professional genealogist since the 1960s and I have another blog of book reviews in the field of family research! To read those, go to BookSmith's Genealogy Book Reviews.
