Terebrate

**** Recommend it Highly recommend if you are a Bill Bryson fan. Highly recommend if you are considering a trip to Australia. Recommend if you are interested in Australia.   I have read a number of Bryson books over the years. My wife and I started many years ago by jointly reading "A Walk in the Woods." It was the book we were consuming before going to sleep for the night. That communal experience of smiling and laughing out loud to the observations of Mr. Bryson as he stumbled down the Appalachian Trail made us fans for life. This book, "In a Sunburned Country,” , about his experiences as he stumbled through Australia, just adds to my fondness of him. He seems to have found a real niche for himself. He is genuinely interested in the world around him; things big and small. He picks something that he doesn’t know anything about, travels to the key places in the world where that the thing exists, and writes about his experiences doing it. His writing is a pleas...

*** Liked it Recommend if you like historical battles. Recommend if you have no clue about the War of 1812. Recommend if you don't know much about President Andrew Jackson. I picked up this book because I really couldn’t remember a damn thing about the War of 1812. I knew that we got the Star Spangled Banner national anthem from this war but didn’t remember why. I knew that I thought President Andrew Jackson was a racist son-of-bitch with his treatment of the American Indians and the Trail of Tears. I also knew that Col Andrew Jackson had a victory in New Orleans from Johnny Horton’s song, "The Battle Of New Orleans.” Lastly, I somehow knew that Davy Crocket served with Jackson in New Orleans before he died at the Alamo. But I didn’t know the details. So, I thought I would try to remedy all of that. Here is the setup. Just 20 years after George Washington defeated the British in the U.S. revolutionary war, the British had impressed some 10,000 American sailors to su...

I hate the the KKK.  I know, saying that out loud is not that brave. How can anybody disagree with the notion that, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, this American domestic terrorist organization was either directly or indirectly responsible for the murder of over 4,400 American citizens between the end of the Civil War and the end of WWII by the particularly gruesome method of racial terror lynchings? Just to put that number into perspective. If we counted the dead for these racial terror lynchings the same way we counted the dead for American war efforts, The KKK would be responsible for the 5th largest American body count far exceeding the dead in the Spanish-American War (2,446) and the civilians killed on 9/11 (2,997) but coming in just behind the dead in the Revolutionary War (4,435.) And yet, most non-black Americans don’t know this or if they do, don’t care. It is definitely not taught in our schools. Even last year, I was definitely in that category of...

**** Recommend it When it first came out in 2013, this book took a lot of heat from religious scholars that did not agree with Reza Aslan’s point of view. I think there were some sour greats too because it shot to the top of the NYTs best seller's list and the the many works of these scholars' on the same material did not. One of their main points was that since Reza Aslan was not saying something new about the material, somehow the book had no value. It is the same reaction that scholars give Malcom Gladwell too. These two authors synthesize deep research on complex subjects outside their field and try to make it readable and entertaining for the masses. When you do that, you are going to explain some of the deep-level details wrong or at least with not enough nuance to be completely correct. In other words, instead of writing an entire book on the subject or a chapter, the idea might get a sentence. For a non-scholar like me, I find that valuable.  From my side, the...