“Modern Polish literature,” writes Milosz, “begins with the generation that emerged from adolescence around 1890.” (p. 322) If Romanticism is the first literary movement with which Milosz and his contemporaries were in dialogue, this generation, called “Young Poland” (Młoda Polska) after 1899, are his immediate forbears, the literary uncles (and much more rarely aunts) who …
Category: History
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/05/10/young-poland-the-history-of-polish-literature-by-czeslaw-milosz/
May 09 2016
The Balkans by Mark Mazower
As part of a series published by the Modern Library, Mark Mazower wrote a 200-page history of The Balkans, and it appeared back in 2000. It’s a handy little book, and it makes me want to take a look at the rest of the series, which feature well-known and opinionated authors writing about subjects on …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/05/09/the-balkans-by-mark-mazower/
May 05 2016
The Thirty Years War by C.V. Wedgwood
As their dates of publication recede into the past, books of history increasingly become artifacts of what they chronicle. They illuminate two periods: the one about which they are written, and the one in which they are written. With academic or more specialist works, this process is faster and more conscious; monographs are written in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/05/05/the-thirty-years-war-by-c-v-wedgwood/
May 01 2016
The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell
I love historical fiction. I don’t often read it (and too often fall into the trap of reading historical fantasy, which I’ve found to be an extremely problematic genre,) but I’m usually pleasantly surprised by how good historical fiction is. Perhaps that has to do as much with the nature of the author who goes …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/05/01/the-last-kingdom-by-bernard-cornwell/
Mar 23 2016
Mussolini’s Italy by R.J.B. Bosworth
I had set aside Mussolini’s Italy for the better part of a year after writing about the first third of it, and then I picked it up again just a few weeks ago. Zeitgeist, I suppose.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/03/23/mussolinis-italy-by-r-j-b-bosworth/
Dec 20 2015
From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe
For those of us in love with the history of Architecture, there are a myriad of scholarly works, photo essays, and the like, many of which are unexceptional reading. But, if there was a book that introduced “out of the box” thinking to 20th century architectural concepts, this is probably it. A classic from 1981, I imagine most …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/12/20/from-bauhaus-to-our-house-by-tom-wolfe/
Dec 15 2015
The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal by Hubert Wolf
I’ll admit, I picked up the book because “ooh, sexy nuns!” But The Nuns Of Sant’Ambrogio turned out to be so much more: an intelligent examination of the Catholic Church in a turbulent period of the 19th century, with this scandal serving to illuminate the theological and political divides that have shaped the institution (and …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/12/15/the-nuns-of-santambrogio-the-true-story-of-a-convent-in-scandal-by-hubert-wolf/
Nov 06 2015
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
So you get to the one part in the book (and anyone who’s read it will know what I’m talking about) and you stop, stunned. And you go back and you read the last part over again. And if you’re me, and essentially a British schoolgirl at your core, like Maddy you burst into uncontrollable …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/11/06/code-name-verity-by-elizabeth-wein/
Oct 31 2015
Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuscinski
I had been thinking how terribly young the soldiers were that Ryszard Kapuściński wrote about in Another Day of Life when he brought me up short by noting that they were the same age as many of the fighters in the Warsaw Uprising at the end of World War II. Alexander Hamilton raised an artillery …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/31/another-day-of-life-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/
Oct 28 2015
Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Between the time when Ryszard Kapuściński saw the revolution in Iran in 1979 and when Shah of Shahs, his book on the subject, was published in 1982, his home country of Poland lived through its own revolution, one that started with strikes at a shipyard in the northern port of Gdańsk but collapsed as the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/28/shah-of-shahs-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/
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