Category: Book Reviews

A Passage to India | India

I know that Forster was painting a picture of the racial tension between the English and Indians—a picture, I might point out, that didn’t turn every Englishman into a villain and every Indian into a martyr (both races had their good and bad points)—but it just wasn’t a picture that really captured my imagination.

Number the Stars | WWII

I could say something here about the beauty of Lois Lowry’s prose, the poetry in her writing, the depth in her characters. All good reasons to enjoy a book. But I’ll just go with this: it’s true and important.

India: A History | India

From about 1000 B.C. t0 1700 A.D., India history is a disjointed creature containing unpronounceable names and a multitude of different kingdoms and dynasties.

Midnight’s Children | India

Because the truth is, Indian life and culture is amazingly complicated. It’s a menagerie of different castes, religions, politics, boundaries, and cultures. It’s like a giant Gordian knot of humanity that you’re trying to unravel, only finally coming to the understanding that it’s impossible to fully understand and organize it.

In the Garden of Beasts | WWII

If you want a unique look into Germany right before the war and those events that led up to it, if you want to read about some of the everyday people who lived and loved and suffered in that country during that time, read this book. It was fascinating and entertaining and a little haunting.

Heaven Is Here | Book Club

Stephanie’s thoughts about love and happiness, discoveries that not many people make, are deep and abiding. Only those who are steeped in the furnace of affliction—truly immersed for months and even years of in that fire of suffering—can easily see those truths that others struggle to understand: you can choose happiness; it doesn’t choose you.

Slaughterhouse-Five | WWII

This book is an interesting look at the typical soldier—and Billy does symbolize any soldier with his non-existent personality— forced to participate in a war not of his choosing.

To Kill a Mockingbird | Book Review

This book touched me on a number of levels, but mostly it taught me to have faith in humanity, to have faith in the good in people. This alone makes the book worth reading.

Germany: A New History | Germany

Germany was so fragmented for so many centuries that, upon finding an identity, it wanted to stretch—so to speak—its fledgling wings.

Hidden Figures | WWII

This book should be read for how it inspires, for how it illustrates hard work and determination and a lack of self-pity can go so far, for how it shows people of all genders and races and nationalities can accomplish so much together.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich | WWII

I knew intellectually that Hitler was something of a mad man. I mean, you can’t murder millions of people with a matter-of-fact, blasé attitude without being crazy. But after reading this book, after the peek I had into his mind, it’s my opinion that he was a completely, repentantly psychopathic monster. He was the worst type of psychotic: brilliant and psychotic. They do the most damage, and he was the tool of the deaths of multitudes.