Category: Nonfiction

Calotypes, daguerrotypes, old city streets and buildings just the same or long disappeared. The lettering on the advertisements: “Maravilla cocoa,” “India rubber & vulcanite works,” a sign for a wigmaker, est. 1760. Gaslights and the working waterfront, bridges being built across the Thames. Somerset house, the basement at the water’s very edge. The dome of…

A fine brief overview of London history, though lacking in the kind of detailed and personal description that I enjoy in city-books like H.V. Morton’s. Also, I rather disagree with Mr. Wilson on the subject of modern and contemporary art, so at the end of the book, I was left rolling my eyes at his…

An elegant little book of essays (an edition of 750 was printed by The Stinehour Press): the physical object, well-designed text on expensive paper, and, of course, Woolf’s prose. The essays were written in the early 1930s for Good Housekeeping, and they’re about modernity, democracy, Englishness, the present of London and the ever-present past, but…

Quirky and fascinating and sweet London essays from the post-WWII years. Morton captures the span & glory of history, from Roman London onward: monarchs & intrigue & so many old buildings. Though his tone can be sentimental or overly nostalgic or a little stuffy (referring to bebop as “the latest disharmony”), it’s mostly just wonderfully…

I was reading this on the train, and a man came over to me and asked something about the title. Internally, I rolled my eyes: no, it’s not that kind of subbing. In this slim volume, Dave tells of his experiences over the course of four years as a substitute educational assistant (EA) in special…

In this history of the American West, Worster writes against the myth of the West as a place of rugged individualism, a place of democratic opportunity that existed in contrast to the hierarchically structured East. By focusing on the issue of irrigation, he aims to show that the West has (and has long had) a…

This weekend, I saw a cash register with a scrolling display that made me want to scream: “Thank’s for shoping at [store name].” Errors in spelling and punctuation jump out at me and grate on my nerves: it’d be fair to say that I’m a stickler when it comes to language and its usage. Somehow,…

In this smart and eloquent book, Noddings argues that happiness should be taken seriously as one of education’s aims. She argues that our society presently seems to have an economic view of education: people go to school in order to go to college and people go to college in order to get better jobs (and…