Dave Schoettinger > Recent Status Updates

Winder has now followed the Hapsburg into the second half of the 18th century where he detects a shift in artistic energy from the religious to the secular.

This is a history of the Habsburg Empire with few footnotes and a fairly light-hearted writing style. The river that inspired the title has thus far been mentioned only in passing.

The author provides detailed descriptions of the conditions that prompted migrants to leave the American South during the first half of the twentieth century.

The author is telling the story of the migration of African-Americans out of the American South during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. She focuses on three different individuals and tells their stories in detail.

The author is providing a response to all who have been dismissive of the history of the African continent and its peoples.

According to the author the first use of the term Middle Ages in English was in the mid-18th century. It was about this time that Europeans realized they had developed a civilization comparable to Rome and Greece of antiquity.

This is basically a history of development of the Christian church in Western Europe.

The author suggests that Christianity is a blend of Judaism and Greek philosophy.

I tried to google the author and got a bunch of pictures of Spiderman and someone named Zendaya.

The author has now taken us to the South Pacific with Margaret Mead and is guiding us through her personal life as well as her academic work. Many readers will find the former to be the more interesting.

Thus far, the book has primarily been a biography of Franz Boas.

All right; the author has convinced me that AI is way smarter than I am and my fellow humans are too busy trolling each other on the internet to care. Hopefully, he has something to say in the last chapter that will make me want to wake up tomorrow.

Harari goes into detail on how a populist leader can turn a democracy into an authoritarian state. If he hadn't written the book more than a year ago, I would have sworn that he was reciting Trump's activities of the last 6 months.

Harari is presenting his analysis of information and the means by which it passes between and connects individual humans.

We have made it to the 14th century and Europeans have "discovered" the Canary Islands ,,, again.

DNA analysis of contemporary Icelanders indicates that there genetic inheritance is from the British Isles almost as much as from Scandinavia. The author suggests that Norse settlers came to Iceland by way of Britain and Ireland where they captured slaves to help them once they reached their ultimate destination.

In the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries, Irish monks set sail in the Atlantic in small boats allowing the wind and currents take them wherever God wanted them to go. The author indicates that they possibly made it to Iceland and maybe the Azores. Being all celibate males, the author suggests that it was difficult for the monks to found permanent settlements.

Evaporation is so prevalent in the Mediterranean Sea that it is usually several feet lower than the Atlantic Ocean. Therefore, a nearly continuous flow goes west to east through the Strait of Gibraltar and requiring vessels headed for the Atlantic to sail uphill.

The author delves into one of the great baseball mysteries of all time. Did Yogi really say all those quotes attributed to him?

The book starts with the 100th greatest player and works toward #1. Of the dozen or so I.ve read, the majority played during all or part of the 1990s when the author was a young sportswriter. He may be showing some favoritism towards players he actually saw play and whom he interviewed.

The author has determined the 100 greatest baseball players of all time and will now justify his selections over the next 800 pages. I peeked and found that I am not included, but will read the book anyway.

Cook has now made his way eastward from Atlantic to Indian to Pacific Oceans. He has stopped at various island paradises and arrived on the northwest coast of North America, where it is raining. I understand it still is.

The author has introduced Captain Cook and filled the reader in with some background to give perspective to what will be the third of his voyages to the Pacific. On this voyage he is tasked with finding the Northwest Passage from its Pacific end.

Must be near the end, Henry VIII is already on wife six.

The political history of the first half of the 16th century as it revolved around these four monarchs.

Typical troubled mother/daughter relationship, except that Mom is worth a trillion euros and the president of France tries to mediate.

Somehow this story which was apparently big news in France in the previous decade flew totally under my radar.

Jakes ha now introduced two pairs of starcrossed lovers whose fates are at the mercy of the vagaries of war. Their plights have now become pretty much the entirety of the plot.