Rating: 7.7/10. This book is a travel diary journal about the Viking world, mostly taking place in locations visited by the Vikings, such as the UK, Iceland, and Scandinavia (although it’s not limited to these places and also describes places that have no connection to the Vikings, like Hawaii, Haida Gwaii, and Italy). The term…
Category: World
The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy
Rating: 7.6/10. Book about the history of Ukraine from ancient times until 2021, when the book was written. Ukraine was always on the frontier between Europe and Asia, for most of his history, the area was known as “Rus” or “Little Russia”, but they rarely ever were able to form their own state, rather they…
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Rating: 7.7/10. A short novel that describes life in a Soviet Gulag in the Arctic in the 1950s. The author himself spent several years in the Gulag; this is one of the first published books that revealed the inner details of the Gulag system, and controversially, it was allowed to be published in the Soviet…
Owners of the Sidewalk by Daniel M. Goldstein
Rating: 8.2/10. Owners of the Sidewalk: Security and Survival in the Informal City by Daniel M. Goldstein Book by an anthropology researcher about the informal economy in Bolivia. The informal economy is characterized by the lack of formal employer employee relationships and is a widespread phenomenon throughout Latin America, but especially in Bolivia, where over…
Overbooked by Elizabeth Becker
Rating: 7.8/10. Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism by Elizabeth Becker Book by a journalist about the global tourism industry and the effects it has had on the world. Tourism started becoming popular in the 1960s and now is a major economic force shaping many countries. Since it is associated with pleasure, tourism…
Forgotten Continent: A History of the New Latin America by Michael Reid
Rating: 7.9/10. Book about the recent history of Latin America — despite encompassing approximately 20 countries and spanning across two continents, the countries in this region has had remarkably similar histories and has faced similar societal issues: inequality, lack of development, political instability, crime, etc. Compared to the Western World, Latin America started to fall…
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Rating: 7.7/10. A romance novel by Colombian Nobel prize winning author. The story is set in a coastal town in Colombia in the late 19th century. The novel starts with elderly doctor Juvenal Urbino and his wife Fermina Daza attending a funeral; Urbino falls off a ladder while reaching for his parrot and dies; immediately…
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
Rating: 7.9/10. Autobiographical memoir by Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who lived through many important historical events in the first half of the 20th century. This book was written shortly before he committed suicide in 1942, feeling that Europe had declined irrecoverably and after living through two endless wars. The memoir starts with the author’s childhood…
A Death in the Rainforest by Don Kulick
Rating: 8.6/10. Book Review: A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea by Don Kulick Book by linguistic anthropologist about his experiences documenting the Tayap language, spoken in Papua New Guinea. Tayap is a language isolate, spoken by less than a hundred…
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Rating: 7.7/10. A fairly short novel set in French Indochina (now Southern Vietnam) in the 1930s. It is supposedly autobiographical and is based on the author’s own experiences growing up in the region, but was written several decades later when the author was around 70. It is a romance between a young and poor 15-year-old…
Notes on a Foreign Country by Suzy Hansen
Rating: 7.9/10. Summary Book about American’s involvement in the Middle East. The author is an American journalist who stationed in turkey, and discovered surprising things about how the locals viewed her country. For most of recent history (except for the 9/11 attacks), the relationships were one-sided: America intervention has always been a key part of…
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
Rating: 8.4/10. Written as though it were a novel, this book is actually a true story of several ordinary people in the Annawadi slum of Mumbai, whom the author observed in 2007-2011. The slum was built in 1991 on airport-owned land by migrant Tamil workers, and grew over the years to house several thousand people….