Book Review: The Pirate by Harold Schechter

I picked this up as part of Amazon's Prime Reading thing where a few books are included free with Prime. There are a series of true crime short reads, and going into a run of night shifts they sounded just the thing to help pass the time. This recounts a grizzly triple murder aboard a …

Book Review: The Diamond Formula by Alina Simone

This is the third of the Inventions series I've read, and the last in the series, which is a shame as they've been a great series of short, fascinating stories from history. This is probably the best of the three, partly because it has the strongest story at the centre. In 1905, Henri Lemoine claimed …

Book Review: The Electric Fairy by Alex Mar

This is the second of a series of Kindle Singles about intervention during the Belle Epoque (Beautiful Era, 1871-1914), a period I know very little about. It was a time of advancement in science and art, with leaps forward in technology changing the world and shaping the 20th century. The period of optimism, of course, …

Book Review: Jump! By Daniel Engber

My Kindle Unlimited subscription lapses soon, and so I've decided to try and make the most of it. Part of this was checking out a few Kindle Singles, starting with this one. Part of a series about inventions and innovation, this book follows two men who in the 1910s were involved in trying to create …

Florida 2019: Kennedy Space Center

NASA's space exploration, particularly during the Cold War Space Race is a period that holds endless fascination. An era where scientific boundaries were being pushed, invention was running wild and brave figures were putting themselves at risk in experimental machines. Astronauts became heroes, they pushed the frontiers of where man had been, they gambled on …

Book Review: Hiroshima by John Hersey

I didn't enjoy this book, but I would still recommend it. In 1946, John Hersey spoke to six people who had been in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped, he then wrote the story of what happened to them on that day and afterwards. In 1985, forty years after the attack he wrote about …

Book Review: “Rommel?” “Gunner who?”: A Confrontation in the Desert by Spike Milligan

Having really enjoyed the first instalment of Spike Milligan's war memoirs, I was keen to get on with the rest of the series. So, when I got an Amazon gift card for my birthday, this was one of the first things I downloaded onto my Kindle. Picking up where the first ends, this sees Milligan and 19th …

Book Review: Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood

You gotta love a good deal on books. On a recent trip to town I visited HMV where they had a two for a fiver offer, I picked up Carrie Fisher's Shockaholic which had been on my radar for a while, and decided to take a punt on this book as the blurb told me this had …

Book Review: Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall by Spike Milligan

What an absolute gem of a book. This is the first part of Milligan's war memoirs and I will definitely be continuing with the series. The book charts Milligan's life from the start of the war through his enlistment and time as a signaller. The book goes right up to his arrival in Algiers with …

Book Review: Peace on Earth by David Boyle

For me, like many, the Christmas Day truce during the First World War is an inspiring moment of shared humanity, compassion and regular men setting aside the machinations and orders of the higher ups to silence the guns and enjoy a brief peace. In this book David Boyle looks at the truce and how it …