Current reading: September, 2023

Finished Cult of the Machine, an exhibition catalogue which considers what the practitioners of "Precisionism" meant to the American scene of the 20th century.

Finished Numbers Don't Lie, a collection of essays often dealing with the history of technology, other when the author deals with the real "cold equations" of world society getting its environmental house in order.

I seem to have lost track of the thread! Im now reading
black seafor the RG Black sea theme . Its a little slow going but Im enjoying learning about the cities surrounding it and the different cultures involved.

also reading the lost education of Horace Tate for the RTT september theme school days. Very interesting to read these early efforts to get educational justice and equality for POC kids. Well written but maddening when you see thngs that happened 50 years ago that is still happening now.

Finished Nigel Davies The Toltecs, an old (1977) book with that tries to extract an historical core from the Aztecs’ traditions about their predecessors. Later Mesoamericanists seem to have largely abandoned the attempt.

Finished the Spomenik Monument Database, which examines how radical abstraction became the preferred form of public expression in Tito's Yugoslavia, and what became of these enigmatic objects in the wake of the collapse of that state.

review for the lost education of Horace Tate is here
https://www.librarything.com/topic/351927#n8226974

Finished Catherine Howard by Lacey Baldwin-Smith
This biography was originally published as A Tudor Tragedy: the Life and Times of Catherine Howard in 1961.
I had read a library copy of the 1961 edition when I was in junior high school. I was delighted to see it had been reissued.
I bought and read the 2010 paperback edition from alibris.com

Finished my forced march through The Making of the Middle Sea. A very impressive work but really not the sort of book that you read from cover to cover!

Finished an excellent Torpedo Terror: 1914-18 U-boat War by Richard Freeman. While it does some relating of U-boat attacks and anti-submarine actions, the book is primarily focused on the broader view, including the political aspects as well and the economic ones.

The Earl and the Pharaoh: From the Real Downton Abbey to the Discovery of Tutankhamun by Countess of Carnarvon
The story of the 5th Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter discovering Tutankhamun's tomb in November 1922. A complement to the Countess's first book Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey!
Note: the Countess used a different publisher for this book. I didn't know she had written a new book until several months ago!

sorry wrong thread

Knocked off The Normans: A History of Conquest. Pretty good, though I would have preferred a little more coverage of the Norman kingdom in Italy.

>12 Shrike58: Several years back I read The Norman Achievement 1050-1100 by David Charles Douglas. It was a little dry, but did contain a lot of information about the Normans in Italy, especially, if I'm remembering correctly, in Sicily.

>13 rocketjk: It turns out that there's a new book from Yale entitled The Normans: Power, Conquest and Culture in 11th Century Europe that seems to deal with the Norman success story more critically. It's not that everything we think we know about the Normans is wrong, but they did get very lucky in hitting a historical "sweet spot." Hopefully I'll get to it sooner rather than later.