Caroline

https://www.goodreads.com/librarianonparade

Caroline’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (1393)
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american-history‎ (524)
british-history‎ (251)
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american-civil-war‎ (126)
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world-war-2‎ (108)

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Caroline is Currently Reading

Caroline is currently reading

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

by Russell Shorto (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: american-history, currently-reading

Reading for the 4th time

read in August 2011

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Caroline said: " This book is about the original Dutch colony founded on the island of Manhattan, originally called New Amsterdam. I knew it existed, but that was literally the limit of my knowledge - so this book was a real eye-opener. It charts the history of the c This book is about the original Dutch colony founded on the island of Manhattan, originally called New Amsterdam. I knew it existed, but that was literally the limit of my knowledge - so this book was a real eye-opener. It charts the history of the colony: its internal struggles with the West Indian Company and its directors, mostly famously Peter Stuyvesant; the on-off again conflicts with the Native Americans; its rivalries with the neighbouring Swedish and English colonies; and its eventual takeover by England during the period breakout of war between England and the Netherlands. It also serves to highlight just how great the influence of the Dutch was in the founding of America - how New York was and always has been a very different creature to the other early cities, like Boston and Philadelphia.

I couldn't put this book down. It's as readable as a novel and twice as interesting. If only all non-fiction could be written like this. I don't think I've ever come across such a wonderfully written history book. Take this section for example:

This book invites you to do the impossible: to strip from your mental image of Manhattan Island all associations of power, concrete, and glass; to put time into full reverse, unfill the massive landfills, and undo the extensive leveling programs that flattened hills and filled gullies; to return streams from the underground sewers they were forced into, back to their original rushing or meandering course. To witness the return of waterfalls, to watch freshwater ponds form in place of asphalt intersections; to let buildings vanish and watch stands of pine oak, sweetgum, basswood, and hawthorne take their place. To imagine the return of salt marshes, mudflats, grasslands, of leopard frogs, grebes, cormorants, and bitterns; to discover newly pure estuaries encrusting themselves with scallops, lamp mussels, oysters, quahogs, and clams. To see maple-ringed meadows become numbered with deer and the higher elevations ruled by wolves.

And then to stop the time machine, let it hover for a moment on the southernmost tip of an island poised between the Atlantic Ocean and the civilization of Europe on one side and a virgin continent on the other; to let that movement swell, hearing the screech of gulls and the slap of waves and imagining these same sounds, waves and birds, waves and birds, with regular interruptions by wracking storms, unchanged for dozens of centuries.

And then let time start forward once again as something comes into view on the horizons. Sails.

When was the last time you read history written like that? ...more "

progress:

(65%)
— Jun 12, 2024 01:59PM

Jun 13, 2024 01:57AM · see review

Caroline is currently reading

Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South

by Jeff Forret

bookshelves: currently-reading, african-american-history, american-history

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progress:

(44%)
— Jun 06, 2026 11:05PM

May 28, 2026 09:47AM

Caroline’s Quotes

“Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

85 likes

“Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

73 likes

“We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place...”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

117 likes

“Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected?”
― Louis de Bernières, Corelli’s Mandolin

tags: childhood, insanity

258 likes

“I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.”
― Pat Conroy

tags: inspirational

27 likes

More of Caroline’s quotes…