This is a general history of Rome meant, I believe, for use in schools as a textbook. It’s written that way anyway, so it’s rather dry. The strength of the book is in the early going when it provides a great deal of pre-history to the empire, pretty much all of which I was unfamiliar …
Tag: History
Raptors Best Draft Picks as of 2015
Earlier this season (2014-15), a click-bait article was published on TSN about the “best” Raptors draft picks of all time, given that this was their 20th season and all. They were, according to the author: Bosh Mighty Mouse Mo Pete DeRozan T Mac No explanation was given for why Mo Pete is considered to be …
Summer of 49 (1989) by David Halberstam
I am not a Yankees fan or a Sox fan but I am a fan of The Breaks of the Game, probably the best book I have ever read about sports. Summer of 49 is not on that level, but, for someone like me who was not alive during the summer of 1949, and who was …
Adoration (2008, Atom Egoyan)
Oh, Egoyan’s attempts to understand the past through contrivances and meta-narratives! Gotta love’em. Whereas with Ararat, Egoyan tried to get us to understand the Armenian genocide through making a movie about making a movie about it (yeesh), here he tries to get us to understand suicide bombing and terrorism, and the resulting prejudice, by making …
Civilization (2011) by Niall Ferguson
This appears to me to be an attempt by Ferguson to provide a sort of sequel to Guns, Germs and Steel. I say that because both books begin the same way – the attempt to answer a question about Europe’s predominance over the last few hundred years and because Ferguson makes multiple reference’s to Diamond. …
The Port Chicago Mutiny (1989) by Robert L. Allen
I was actually completely unaware of the occurrence of the Port Chicago explosion or subsequent “mutiny,” so this book was quite eye-opening.
Stillwell and the American Experience in China (1971) by Barbara Tuchman
Tuchman appears to be attempting two disparate things with this book: to tell the story of Joseph Stillwell’s career in the military and to tell the story of US intervention in China from the (first) Chinese revolution to the expulsion of the Kuomintang. She succeeds at the former a lot more than the latter, in …
Extraordinary Canadians: Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin (2010, Penguin) by John Raulston Saul
I first learned about Robert Baldwin in grade 7, and I can’t say that particular bit of junior high history moved me much. I was far more interested in the war of 1812 at the time, because I was a boy and because I liked military history, not history. So I can’t say I thought …
The Great Transformation (1944) by Karl Polanyi
Despite two very serious flaws, The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi is a major, important, path-breaking and near-classic work of economics.
The Hockey Hall of Fame Bias towards “Last time we won the cup was…”
The more I went through previous Hockey Hall of Fame admissions for a previous blog entry, the more I became aware of a pattern: the sheer number of inductees who played for a franchise’s last cup winner. Memory is an extraordinarily powerful force and it seems like the memory of a franchise’s “last great team” …
The album isn’t dead…and if it is, that’s not a good thing
I reject the claim that the album is dead since I own hundreds and I know many who also own hundreds. Moreover, I live near multiple stores that sell albums. I bought one for my brother the other day. I intend to go by some this week for myself, as well. But if it is …
Bollywood
Last night I went to a house warming party and drank a bit too much red wine. (Which is hilarious given that I haven’t gotten drunk off wine in what feels like years.) Given the time of year the subject of TIFF naturally came up and we eventually got on to Slumdog, a film I …
RIP Gerald E. Tucker
Though Professor Gerald Tucker initially confounded me, as he did many first year students, he became one of my favourite professors at Bishop’s University while I was there – perhaps my favourite. He never finished the curriculum for any class I took with him – I’m not sure we ever made it 2/3rds of the …
NHL Realignment
Provided the Thrashers are indeed moving to Winnipeg (and I have no reason to doubt this story because it originated in a paper owned by one of the Partners of True North) and provided no other teams move this off-season, the NHL will have to realign its divisions. How do they do that?
Point Forwards and Shooting Forwards
The concept of the point forward was introduced some time ago – in the ’80s I think – but it is still resisted in many quarters. There are a few people on the TSN boards who constantly get upset when anyone uses the term “point forward,” especially back when Turkoglu was on the Raptors. The …
Evolution of Riley’s Political Views
As a teenager, I was a statist, a borderline fascist. I may have believed in liberal ideas in theory – my grade 11 politics class group was the only group to propose a liberal constitution instead of a utopian one for a project – but I thought the government should draft the unemployed. I was …
Why is it so hard for some people to beleive that the people in charge don’t have their own agenda?
[Responding to the above question submitted to me using Formspring:] We can debate endlessly the meaning of “in charge” but I can’t agree with your first statement. Nobody is actually “in charge” in the sense that nobody has the power to do whatever they want. A cursory look at Obama’s struggles implementing his agenda is …