On January 19th I posted about a few selected non-fiction books I have added to my wish-list. There are too many to count and not enough time in the hours of a day that direct our attention elsewhere! A bibliophile’s struggle one might often say. This topic is an enjoyable pastime to discuss among fellow book lovers and I’m delighted to be sharing this book blog entry with you.
This past weekend I began reading Martin Luther by Eric Metaxas and I’m enjoying his telling of Luther a great deal. I wanted to read a highly regarded biography on Luther and was delighted to find a copy at Half Price Books. I was fortunate to obtain a hardback that is in excellent condition. Below you will find the description of the Luther book and a few other titles that may pique your interest.
Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World by Eric Metaxas
Description
On All Hallow’s Eve in 1517, a young monk named Martin Luther posted a document he hoped would spark an academic debate, but that instead ignited a conflagration that would forever destroy the world he knew. Five hundred years after Luther’s now famous Ninety-five Theses appeared, Eric Metaxas, acclaimed biographer of the bestselling Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy and Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, paints a startling portrait of the wild figure whose adamantine faith cracked the edifice of Western Christendom and dragged medieval Europe into the future. Written in riveting prose and impeccably researched, Martin Luther tells the searing tale of a humble man who, by bringing ugly truths to the highest seats of power, caused the explosion whose sound is still ringing in our ears. Luther’s monumental faith and courage gave birth to the ideals of liberty, equality, and individualism that today lie at the heart of all modern life.
Ben & Me
In Search of a Founder’s Formula for a Long and Useful Life by Eric Weiner
Pub Date 11 Jun 2024
Description
New York Times bestselling author Eric Weiner follows in the footsteps of Benjamin Franklin, mining his life for inspiring and practical lessons in a book that’s part biography, part travelogue, part personal prescription.
Ben Franklin lingers in our lives and in our imaginations. One of only two non-presidents to appear on US currency, Franklin was a founder, statesman, scientist, inventor, diplomat, publisher, humorist, and philosopher. He believed in the American experiment, but Ben Franklin’s greatest experiment was…Ben Franklin. In that spirit of betterment, Eric Weiner embarks on an ambitious quest to live the way Ben lived.
Not a conventional biography, Ben & Me is a guide to living and thinking well, as Ben Franklin did. It is also about curiosity, diligence, and, most of all, the elusive goal of self-improvement. As Weiner follows Franklin from Philadelphia to Paris, Boston to London, he attempts to uncover Ben’s life lessons, large and small. We learn how to improve a relationship with someone by inducing them to do a favor for you—a psychological phenomenon now known as The Ben Franklin Effect. We learn about the printing press (the Internet of its day), early medicine, diplomatic intrigue and, of course, electricity. And we learn about ethics, persuasion, humor, regret, appetite, and so much more.
At a time when history is either neglected or contested, Weiner argues we have much to learn from the past and that we’d all be better off if we acted and thought a bit more like Ben did, even if he didn’t always live up to his own high ideals. Engaging, smart, moving, quirky, Ben & Me distills the essence of Franklin’s ideas into grounded, practical wisdom for all of us.
Drawn Testimony
My Four Decades as a Courtroom Sketch Artist
by Jane Rosenberg
Pub Date 13 Aug 2024
Description
A penetrating, compulsively readable memoir about the four-decade career of America’s top courtroom sketch artist, for fans of Lab Girl and Working Stiff
Jane Rosenberg is America’s pre-eminent courtroom sketch artist. For over forty years, she’s been at the heart of the story, covering almost every major trial that has passed through the New York justice system. From mob bosses to fallen titans of finance, terrorists and sex abusers, corrupt cops and warring entertainment icons, she has drawn them all.
In Drawn Testimony, Rosenberg brings us into the high-stakes, dramatic world of her craft, where art, psychology and courtroom drama collide. Over the course of her legendary career, Jane has had a front row seat to some of the most iconic and notorious moments in our nation’s recent history, sketching everything from Tom Brady’s deflate-gate case, to John Lennon’s murder trial to cases against Ghislaine Maxwell, John Gotti, Harvey Weinstein and most recently, the indictment against former President Donald Trump. Readers will learn how she has honed her unique powers of perception, but also what her portraits reveal, not only about her subjects, but about the human condition in general.
Fearless, fascinating and gorgeously written, Drawn Testimony captures the unique career of an artist whose body of work depicts history as it’s happening.
My Roman History
A Memoir
by Alizah Holstein
Pub Date 25 Jun 2024
Description
In this exquisite and profound memoir, a medieval historian traces her lifelong obsession with Rome and the encounters with the city’s past and present that became fulcrum points in her life
From the time she first felt called to its gates as a high school student fascinated by Dante and Italian thanks to a life-changing teacher, Rome has been a fixed star around which Alizah Holstein’s life has rotated—despite the fact that she bears no Italian heritage, and has never lived there long enough to call it home.
In this kaleidoscopic yet intimate memoir, her shifting relationship to a vibrant city layered with human history becomes a lens on why we look to the past, on the mysteries of affinity and desire, and on what it means to grow up. Holstein weaves the stories of Romans past and present, and encounters with the city of historical figures from Petrarch to Freud, into the narrative of her evolution from a curious student abuzz with the thrill of discovery, to a lonely researcher in a city to which she feels she belongs despite knowing no one, to an ambitious young historian struggling to find her place in the halls of academia. Following a trail of memories—that first taste of a tartufo cioccolato in Piazza Navona, the ancient walls of the Via Appia blurring from the back of a motorcycle, the smudge of ink on a manuscript left by a scribe’s hand over seven hundred years before—she explores what it means to be romana, Roman—and to find solace and self-knowledge in the presence of the past.
An enveloping, original, and deeply resonant account, set against one of the world’s most beguiling cities, of the unexpected things that give our lives meaning, My Roman History is a profound depiction of the winding path to self-realization, which—much like history itself—is mysterious, captivating, and ever-unfolding.
I’m currently reading two books right now but this story took front and center in the first page. I spent the better part of the evening-yesterday- reading it and it was a struggle to put it down to sleep. I’m half way through and it’s all I can think about. This story has ceased hold of my heart. It’s the story for the ages and a story that I want to shout from the roof tops about how extraordinary and evoking it is. I can’t remember the last time I have been transported and completely immersed in the characters lives. It’s as if the character’s hopes, dreams, longing, plight is your own. This is the story and the writing I have been waiting for! -Stephanie Hopkins
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century
After the tragic death of her husband, Aven Norgaard is beckoned to give up her life in Norway to become a housekeeper in the rugged hills of nineteenth-century Appalachia. Upon arrival, she finds herself in the home of her late husband’s cousins—three brothers who make a living by brewing hard cider on their three-hundred-acre farm. Yet even as a stranger in a foreign land, Aven has hope to build a new life in this tight-knit family.
The Jane Austen Society
The Indigo Ghosts
Layered Pages 