London: Arms and Armour Press, 1995.
I’ve worked my way through several volumes in this publisher’s “Source Book” series — disappeared into them for days at a time, actually — and this one is well up to the superior quality I’ve found in the others. Each book takes an “everything you want to know” approach and is largely successful for any reader without a Ph.D. in the subject under discussion.
London: Peter Davies, 1968 (NY: St. Martin, 2012).
In 1920, thirteen-year-old Margaret Langley, like many English girls her age, had to go out to work. Her father, a house-painter, was unemployed for half the year and with five children in the family, money was very tight indeed. Margaret had to take the earliest opportunity to support herself.
NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
I recently read Bechdel’s Fun Home and it simply blew me away. It happens to be a graphic novel (and the art is first-rate) but it could just as easily have been a text-only memoir about the author’s early years in what we refer to in shorthand as a “dysfunctional family,” and it would have been equally successful.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992 (Ft. Collins, CO: Old Army Press, 1978).
In 1972, Stallard was completing a master’s degree in social history. Partly because of her family’s more than two centuries of involvement with the American military, and partly because of her own interest in the then-new field of “women’s studies,” she wrote her thesis not on the Regular Army itself during the post-Civil War conflicts with the Indians, but rather on the situation and experiences of the families that accompanied so many officers and even NCOs to their posts on the frontier.
London: National Maritime Museum Publishing, 2005.
About a year ago, I read and very much enjoyed (and, of course, reviewed here) James Porterfield’s Dining by Rail (1993), a history (with many recipes) of the food served on America’s railroads. I had hoped this book would do something similar for dining at sea, but it’s something of a disappointment.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
This is, to put it very simply, an amazing book. It’s so filled with humanity and understanding and love and memories, it’s almost impossible to review. You want to just hand it to people and say, “Here. Read this. Now.”
NY: Norton, 1952.
The short of it is, the author was born in England in 1885 and these are her memories of growing up there. But the long of it is, the corner of England she grew up in was Cambridge, one of the world’s great intellectual centers, and the family she grew up in was the Darwins.
North Pomfret, VT: David & Charles, 1980.
The author, an established art historian and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, was born in 1909 into a professional family, legal men of long standing on one side and military men on the other, who had become part of the minor gentry. (Her paternal aunt was one of the first women Members of Parliament.)
London: Bloomsbury, 2008.
In the mid-1960s, young Cartwright, a native of Johannesburg, arrived at Oxford to pursue an M.A. The place took hold of him almost instantly and lodged itself deep in his personality and psyche, as happens to a great many of those privileged to study there.
London: Brockhampton Press, 1991.
When Victoria came to the throne in 1837, two-thirds of England’s population lived in the countryside, mostly in small villages and hamlets. At the time of her death in 1901, more than three-quarters of her people lived in towns and cities. That’s a lot of change for one lifetime.
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.
