Roy Lotz's Blog, page 8

Return to Vienna

The train to Vienna was boarding in Budapest’s Keleti station. An elderly Hungarian woman, speaking broken German, asked me to help her with her bags. I did so, and then took a seat on the train. We were bound for Vienna.

The ride was not quite as uneventful as I had hoped. For one, I soon discovered that the ticket I purchased online (for a very reasonable price) did not come with a seat number. Thus, anytime the train made a stop, there was a chance that I would be booted by someone who di...

Review: American Colonies

American Colonies: The Settling of North America by Alan Taylor

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an exceptional volume of popular history. Few periods, I reckon, are as mythologized and misunderstood as the European colonization of the United States. In my public school, for example, I learned that the heroic Columbus proved the earth wasn’t flat, and that the Pilgrims lived in joyful harmony with the Wampanoag. To be fair, in high school, this ridiculously rosy picture was brought back to earth so...

Review: The Corner

The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood by David Simon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Some authors have the power to make you feel that you are just understanding the world for the first time. This is, for example, Roberto Caro’s gift. In every one of his books, he seems to expose the world of politics, revealing its inner workings like an ant colony on display in a transparent container. And this is also the consummate gift of this writing team, Simon and Burns. Here, as in Simon’s ...

Review: Homicide

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


What led me here (as I suspect is true of many readers) was my love of The Wire. Of all of the television I have seen, I found Simon’s masterpiece to be uniquely engrossing and thought-provoking. And despite the obvious creative license taken with the plot, what makes the show so compelling is the bedrock foundation of fact upon which the story is based. Thus, I wanted to get to know some of Simon’s source material dire...

Budapest or Bust

I have never met a person who has traveled to Budapest and didn’t like it. Though the city was not even on my travel radar when I arrived in Europe—not featuring prominently in any of the history I was familiar with—one glowing review after another was enough to convince me to pay the city a visit. “Not every city has a vibe,” one of my friends told me one day. “Budapest definitely has a vibe.”

I arrived in Budapest one day in early April, fully ready to be vibed (or whatever the verb might b...

Review: The Emperor of All Maladies

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I do not consider myself a superstitious person—not even remotely—but somehow I felt a deep reluctance to pick up this book. It may have taken us a long time to figure out the germ theory of diseases, yet the psychology of contagion runs deep. I had the irrational fear that even learning about cancer would somehow unleash it into my life.

But turning away from frightful things is not a good way to liv...

Chicago: Sewage and Synchronicity

For years, one of my closest childhood friends, Greg, was living in Chicago as he completed his Ph.D. in history. In the summer of 2021, he was at work on his dissertation, which meant the window to visit him was narrowing. So my brother and I made the journey from New York for a long weekend in the windy city.

As the plane broke through the high, wispy clouds, the city came into view. What was revealed was an astonishingly flat landscape divided into grids as far as the eye could see. We...

Review: The Path to Power

The Path to Power by Robert A. Caro

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Last winter, I went to the Film Forum in Manhattan with some friends to see the new documentary about Robert Caro and his famous editor, Robert Gottlieb. It was a wonderful experience on many levels. The documentary was fascinating and inspiring—the story of two people who, in quite different ways, have lived fully dedicated to literature—and it was the perfect place to see it, in the heart of Caro’s and Gottlieb’s city, surrounded by oth...

Review: Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity

Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity: Guide to a first reading by Michael Faraday

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


In the first volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, there is a fantastic chapter about what life in the Texas Hill Country was like before electricity arrived. Every basic task was substantially more difficult: water had to be carried in buckets, clothes had to be washed by hand, water had to be boiled over an open fire, milk and eggs had to be refrigerated in ice cel...

Gauchos: A Lifelong Bar

One of the best parts of living in Spain is the restaurant scene. The country is exceptional simply for the number of dining establishments. If I had to guess, I would say that there must be more bars and cafés per capita here than in any other country in the world. And though you may not think so, this alone is quite a wonderful thing, since you really never have to worry about where you are going to eat or drink. Chances are, there will be something close.

But in this post I want to focus, ...