Friday, February 22, 2013

The great big book of horrible things : the definitive chronicle of history's 100 worst atrocities / Matthew White




The great big book of horrible things : the definitive chronicle of history's 100 worst atrocities / Matthew White

An excellent straight forward historical read.
You will learn a lot of things you didn't know, which is  one of my  criteria for a good non--fiction book....  

The book ranks the events of history in terms, of the number of people who died. 

Here is description from Amazon.com:

A compulsively readable and utterly original account of world history—from an atrocitologist’s point of view.
Evangelists of human progress meet their opposite in Matthew White's epic examination of history's one hundred most violent events, or, in White's piquant phrasing, "the numbers that people want to argue about." Reaching back to 480 BCE's second Persian War, White moves chronologically through history to this century's war in the Congo and devotes chapters to each event, where he surrounds hard facts (time and place) and succinct takeaways (who usually gets the blame?) with lively military, social, and political histories. With the eye of a seasoned statistician, White assigns each entry a ranking based on body count, and in doing so he gives voice to the suffering of ordinary people that, inexorably, has defined every historical epoch. By turns droll, insightful, matter-of-fact, and ultimately sympathetic to those who died, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things gives readers a chance to reach their own conclusions while offering a stark reminder of the darkness of the human heart. 20 black-and-white illustrations and 4 maps 

Friday, February 15, 2013

On writing....

Sometimes your  just not sure where you want to go!

So here's a new post...On the process of writing...They say that the one way to create traffic for your blog to create lots of posts. That may explain why some bloggers post too much, and create lots of filler posts. Other bloggers are actually good at creating interesting material on a regular basis, and I suppose those are the bloggers that are actually  successful.

I just like to write, I have a list of ideas to write about-that sits unpublished on this site-eventually I will probably get to some of the ideas on the list.  The  things on the list are things  that I want to write about, or things I have some knowledge of. I usually find, that  I don't have the patience to write an article and get it to communicate exactly what I want to  communicate and when I go back to read such articles I am not quite happy.   The first book I wrote was a genealogy book, it took over ten years to finish it, simply because I envisioned it being a certain way, and until I could it get there I wasn't going to be happy.

A have long planned a ABBA discography book based on my ABBA website-for a long time I have never finished it-because I am not sure it would come out the way I want it too..t took eighteen years of work-but finally I was able to get and done. And if I die tomorrow -that will be a small legacy.



Well anyway, so there's a new post ...  Here's a picture or two....
My house from above...


A doodle by Stevie!
Published originally February 16, 2013