Carolyn's comments (member since Sep 24, 2007)

Carolyn's comments from the Our History group.

I loved all three of those books, so maybe you will like these...

Critique of Criminal Reason by Michael Gregorio - A student of Immanuel Kant investigates serial killings in 1803 Konigsberg.

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle attempts to aid an unfairly accused Scots-Indian lawyer.

Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin - Henry II hires a female Italian coroner to investigate the serial killings that have forced the unfairly accused Jews of Cambridge into protective custody.

The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin - A eunuch detective is hired by the sultan to investigate mysterious killings in 1836 Ottoman Empire.

Oh, I also just read "My Holocaust", which is a very dark humor look at a fictional family's Holocaust corporation. The corporation was begun by a married couple of Holocaust survivors, and continued by their son, and basically the solicit donations to defend the memory of the Holocaust, through monuments, lawsuits, etc. The conflict in the story involves other groups who want their genocides to be recognized and the defensiveness of the founder of the corporation towards this idea. The "Holocaust as universal" viewpoint is brought home to the characters by the granddaughter of the founder, who decides to become a Catholic nun because "Christians are today's Jews." This doesn't sound like it would be funny, but the author does an excellent job of pointing out people's hypocrisies on both sides of the issue.

I was mostly intrigued by his Victorian upbringing, particularly about how he and his brother would knock their governesses down and stomp on them with their tiny brass boots, and this was brushed off as ordinary high spirits!

The website "A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust" has a great literature section here: http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/arts/lit.h... It lists a ton of books on the holocaust, all nicely divided into categories.

One of my favorite biographies is Captain Sir Richard Frances Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West. It was written by Edward Rice in 1990. He had such an adventurous life, it can't help but be exciting!

If you are interested in fiction, I loved the Cairo Trilogy by the late Naguib Mahfouz. It takes place just after WWI, in Cairo, obviously. Gate of the Sun, by Elias Khoury, tells stories of Palestine from 1948 to 1998.

If you want nonfiction, you can't pass up Reading Lolita in Tehran. I also loved Three Cups of Tea, which is about a businessman who devotes his life to setting up secular schools in Afghanistan, which local villages love but the Taliban disapproves of. It is really great for its look at local customs. I also heartily recommend Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present, even though I hadn't had time to get past the first few chapters yet.

And, if you want to watch a movie that is even more fascinating and horrifying than Thousand Splendid Suns, watch Osama, which came out in 2003. It is about a 12-year old Afghan girl who is forced to dress as a boy to support her mother and grandmother, since that Taliban has forbidden all women from work and school. I'm not sorry I watched it but it took a long time to deal with it.

The reviews haven't been good. It almost exclusively uses people's memories without checking them against the historical record to see if they were typical or not. Plus he got a lot of criticism for not including perspectives from any Hispanic veterans, who were major contributers to the war effort. Plus I think I read somewhere that any unsavory aspects of the war, such as internment camps and segregation, received only token treatment. All this raises the question of whether the film is mean as a documentary of "The War," or a documentary of our nostalgia for "The War."