Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor
What, you thought napalm was a new thing? This book will disabuse your mind of that notion pronto. According to Mayor, mankind has been thinking up new and more horrible ways to spread terror and kill more people faster since before Alexander. Beehive bombs. Snake bombs. Poisonous spider bombs. Naphtha bombs. Arrows poisoned with snake venom or tipped with burning pitch to set the besieged city on fire. Catapulting the plague dead over the castle walls. There is no end, and, evidently, a very early beginning to mankind's ingenuity and bloodthirstiness.
Did you know rhododendrons were poisonous? And did you know that if bees fed on rhododendron nectar, that if you ate the honey they produced that it would kill you? It's how Colchis defeated Xenophon in 401 BC.
# Permanent link to Snake bombs. That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout.
Shakespeare's Rebel by C.C. Humphreys
I'm sort of surprised I finished this book, as I am not a fan of the Earl of Essex, and I almost put it down anyway when the story opens with the hero coming off a month-long drunk. Yawn.
But I persevered, and John Lawley is a fun character to follow around, in spite of all the insane and oftentimes suicidal decisions he makes. The author does a good job with the place and the time, London circa 1599 and all the attendant paranoia that consumed the population at that time. Elizabeth is robust, Robert Cecil weasely, and the ensemble cast whether real or fictional strut and fret their hour upon the stage with vigor.
Recommended for anyone who likes historical novels, Shakespeare, or swordfighting. You'll even find out what a swashbuckle is.
# Permanent link to Shakespeare and swordfighting. Also whiskey. A lot of whiskey.
In 1390, however, Sultan Bayezid began his conquests in Asia Minor. His Muslim troops were unwilling to fight their co-religionists, whom, anyway, they could not loot with a clear conscience...
# Permanent link to Altogether the most efficient account of a six-hundred year empire I’ve ever read.
In the Morning I'll be Gone by Adrian McKinty
The third in McKinty's trilogy (following The Cold Cold Ground and I Hear the Sirens in the Street) featuring peeler (aka Royal Ulster Constabulary police detective) Sean Duffy in Northern Ireland in the early '80s, a fraught and dangerous time of Maze Prison hunger strikes and IRA bombings and then, of course, the murder cases Sean must work and solve. None of them ends very satisfyingly for him but this is a three-book flash photo of the time that you will not be able to forget, with walk-ons by historical figures like Gerry Adams, Ian Paisley, John Delorean, JFK's nephew Joe Kennedy and even Margaret Thatcher.
This book builds the trilogy to a big finish, in which Sean is required to solve a cold case murder to stop an IRA assassination. The most horrifying moment is reserved for a quiet conversation at the end that makes you realize how bittersweet the title really is. Well worth reading.
# Permanent link to How hard could it be to police Northern Ireland during the Troubles? Answer: Pretty hard.
Luristan is still an enchanted name. Its streams are dotted blue lines on the map and the position of its hills a matter of taste...I spent a fortnight in that part of the country where one is less frequently murdered...
# Permanent link to “…that part of the country where one is less frequently murdered…”
Mr. Stackpool was a stout, cheerful, talkative solicitor. He wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses which were so thick and heavy that they constantly threatened to pull his face down into his collar. Mrs. Stackpool was smaller all round. She had a worried expression. it could easily have been caused by her husband's bidding and play.
# Permanent link to “This is not a B.B.C. television program.”
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 4/26/2010]
We are lucky in our lifetime to have scientists who are as able with their pens as they are with their petrie dishes, people like Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson, Lewis Thomas.
# Permanent link to Carl Sagan
My personal favorite is astronomer Carl Sagan, yes, he of the billions and billions. In his collections of essays, this curious and eclectic thinker writes about everything from the sex lives of dolphins to the prehistory of earth to Immanuel Velikovsky’s theories of alien visitation. No subject is safe from Sagan, in print or in life, and he was one of modern science’s great interpreters, even when it wasn’t strictly necessary, vide the following story.
Tangier has been mentioned in history for three thousand years. And it was a town, although a queer one, when Hercules, clad in his lion-skin landed here four thousand years ago. In the streets he met Anitus, the king of the country, and brained him with his club, which was the fashion among gentlemen in those days.
# Permanent link to “You may please to understand that I am hear in Salley, in most miserable captivitye, under the hands of most cruel tyrants.”
All Finnegan knew, and all he wanted to know, was that he was loved without question.
# Permanent link to “The pickle today might have been a miscalculation…”
The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession by Charlie Lovett
Peter Byerly, an antiquarian book dealer, has escaped to England to try to recover from the death of his beloved wife, Amanda, when he finds a painting of her between the pages of a book. The problem is, the watercolor of Amanda was painted a hundred years before she was born.
Peter steals it and embarks on a quest to discover who the mysterious painter, B.B., was, and who the model was who sat for the portrait. This leads by various ways and means to a breakneck and bloody chase across England in pursuit of the one book that may -- or may not -- provide irrefutable proof that Shakespeare did in fact write Shakespeare and shut the Oxfordians up once and for all.
# Permanent link to Shutting up the Oxfordians