Rebecca Reads

In The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester delves into two contrasting yet similar personalities who helped to create the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). One is the professor, Dr. James Murray, a prolific scholar who undertakes the daunting task of creating a comprehensive dictionary; the other is a madman, Dr. William C. Minor, a schizophrenic [...]

As I mentioned recently, I minored in “International Studies” in college. I took courses in political history, U.S. international relations, anthropology, and sociology. I also took one economics class, but I don’t recall a thing about it.  My minor was too broad, because I don’t remember very much, and it’s only been five years. I [...]

Katharine Graham was most well-known to me for being publisher of The Washington Post during the newspaper’s reporting of Watergate. However, her life extended far beyond the walls of the Washington Post city room. In a sense, her life was a life of contrasts and similarities. After reading Katharine Graham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, Personal History, [...]

Suggested by: Thisisnotabookclub
What is reading, anyway? Novels, comics, graphic novels, manga, e-books, audiobooks — which of these is reading these days? Are they all reading? Only some of them? What are your personal qualifications for something to be “reading” — why? If something isn’t reading, why not? Does it matter? Does it impact your desire [...]

There are hundreds of book blogs reviewing The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I didn’t really read any of them before I began this book. What I did read was my cousin’s suggestion that I read it, along with some comments she had. She wrote:
It addresses orphans and hunger and family separation and Jewishness during [...]

Ignored Characters
As I mentioned, to my surprise, I loved rereading Little Women. I think I liked it more now than when I first read it as a teenager, simply because the goody-goody characters were refreshing to me after the novels and the nonfiction books I’ve been reading. I related to the girls.
Author Geraldine Brooks read [...]

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a young adult novel (other than Harry Potter, which doesn’t count), so when I picked up Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women this week, I was at first taken aback by the rosy, generic moral lessons within it. As I began, I wasn’t sure I was going to [...]

Real Politics
Recently, I’ve been watching The West Wing, which aired on NBC from 1999 to 2006. We’re currently watching season 5 of 7. This television show follows the eight White House years of Democratic President Jed Bartlet and his staff. Of course, being a television drama, President Bartlet has an incredibly interesting presidency (the details [...]

The Mind of a Genius
Even at his death, Albert Einstein was regarded as someone with an incredible brain: the pathologist performing the autopsy decided, without asking permission, to embalm Einstein’s brain. For years, he kept the brain and drove around the United States touring with it. A few studies were done on the brain to [...]