Caroline

https://www.goodreads.com/librarianonparade

Caroline’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (1394)
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read‎ (1353)
did-not-finish‎ (2)
american-history‎ (524)
british-history‎ (251)
english-history‎ (200)
biography‎ (194)
wishlist‎ (141)
american-civil-war‎ (126)
medieval-history‎ (116)
world-war-2‎ (108)

women-s-history‎ (100)
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Caroline is Currently Reading

Caroline is currently reading

An Inconvenient Widow: The Torment, Trial, and Triumph of Mary Todd Lincoln

by Lois Romano

bookshelves: currently-reading

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20 hours, 32 min ago

Caroline is currently reading

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

by Russell Shorto (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: american-history, currently-reading

Reading for the 4th time

read in August 2011

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Caroline said: " This book is about the original Dutch colony founded on the island of Manhattan, originally called New Amsterdam. I knew it existed, but that was literally the limit of my knowledge - so this book was a real eye-opener. It charts the history of the c This book is about the original Dutch colony founded on the island of Manhattan, originally called New Amsterdam. I knew it existed, but that was literally the limit of my knowledge - so this book was a real eye-opener. It charts the history of the colony: its internal struggles with the West Indian Company and its directors, mostly famously Peter Stuyvesant; the on-off again conflicts with the Native Americans; its rivalries with the neighbouring Swedish and English colonies; and its eventual takeover by England during the period breakout of war between England and the Netherlands. It also serves to highlight just how great the influence of the Dutch was in the founding of America - how New York was and always has been a very different creature to the other early cities, like Boston and Philadelphia.

I couldn't put this book down. It's as readable as a novel and twice as interesting. If only all non-fiction could be written like this. I don't think I've ever come across such a wonderfully written history book. Take this section for example:

This book invites you to do the impossible: to strip from your mental image of Manhattan Island all associations of power, concrete, and glass; to put time into full reverse, unfill the massive landfills, and undo the extensive leveling programs that flattened hills and filled gullies; to return streams from the underground sewers they were forced into, back to their original rushing or meandering course. To witness the return of waterfalls, to watch freshwater ponds form in place of asphalt intersections; to let buildings vanish and watch stands of pine oak, sweetgum, basswood, and hawthorne take their place. To imagine the return of salt marshes, mudflats, grasslands, of leopard frogs, grebes, cormorants, and bitterns; to discover newly pure estuaries encrusting themselves with scallops, lamp mussels, oysters, quahogs, and clams. To see maple-ringed meadows become numbered with deer and the higher elevations ruled by wolves.

And then to stop the time machine, let it hover for a moment on the southernmost tip of an island poised between the Atlantic Ocean and the civilization of Europe on one side and a virgin continent on the other; to let that movement swell, hearing the screech of gulls and the slap of waves and imagining these same sounds, waves and birds, waves and birds, with regular interruptions by wracking storms, unchanged for dozens of centuries.

And then let time start forward once again as something comes into view on the horizons. Sails.

When was the last time you read history written like that? ...more "

progress:

(65%)
— Jun 12, 2024 01:59PM

Jun 13, 2024 01:57AM · see review

Caroline’s Quotes

“I ask you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self, and best earthly companion.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

tags: marriage-proposal

1220 likes

“To be more precise it was the color of heartache.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

151 likes

“Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.”
― Shawn Slovo, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

tags: love

3802 likes

“Reader, I married him.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

2272 likes

“The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

tags: introspective, magic

90 likes

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