Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Elizabeth Letts, The Perfect Horse I just love the idea of horse master race…

Philip Thomas Tucker, Pickett’s Charge ‘For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and […]

Lydia Pyne, Seven Skeletons  Looking forward to this one, too….

Ted Sandling: London in Fragments Father Thames gives up his treasures…

Daniel Todman, Britain’s War Promising, first of two volumes…

Tevi Troy, Shall We Wake the President Great title, reserving judgement on the book, hope to get a copy soon.

Masha Gessen, Where the Jews Aren’t Might be a good one for bizarrists, the Soviet attempt to create a Jewish homeland. Naturally, this being the Soviet Union, it didn’t end well…

Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy Always been curious about Attica, looking forward to getting this.

Lara Feigel in the postwar vein: The Bitter Taste of Victory, just under 500 pages…

Duncan Hamilton, For the Glory, on the Chariots of Fire hero… (‘Suffer the children…’)

Some of the most horrific stats from WW2 are the survival rates of Russian and German POWs in each other’s camps. Adelbert Holl’s After Stalingrad is now available in English.

Lori Clune, on the demise of Mr and Mrs R: Executing the Rosenbergs: Death and Diplomacy in a Cold War World, perhaps the book I’m most looking forward to this month…

Joshua Rubenstein, The Last Days of Stalin, another promising summer book…

One of the books I’m looking forward to, Moira Weigel, Labor of Love on the invention and persistence (against all the odds) of dating.

John Brooks on what promises to be a very good CUP book on The Battle of Jutland! It was time…