The Book Shopper

Bookshops from Around the World

I recently finished reading Jorge Carrión's Bookshops: A Reader's History (2016), a browser's voyage of bookshops from around the world. The voyage includes a passage through time since some of the bookshops cease to exist except in the author's  memory. I am not much of a world traveler, but I have shopped in four of Carrión's favorites.  Shown above from the top: Athenaeum Amsterdam, two scenes from the book bazaar in Istanbul, two photos from Last Book Store in Los Angeles and The Strand in New York. 

To best enjoy this book (a gift from my older daughter Cynthia who lives in Germany and provided this photo adjacent Another Country in Berlin's Kreuzberg district, a used bookstore mentioned Carrión's book ) you might want to utilize a browsing (not skimming) frame of mind since it is unlikely you are familiar with many of the international writers and historical references that Carrión writes about. When this happens, just take your time and shuffle along to the next paragraph, remembering one of the author's truisms: "While orderliness tends to predominate in bookshops that sell new books, chaos reigns in second-hand shops: the disorderly accumulation of knowledge."

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Five Notable Books About The Great War

For me, World War I isn’t an event remembered once a century, it was something I grew up with since both of my grandfathers fought in The Great War. Captain Glenn R. Browne was in the 35th Division over in France and my mother’s father Sergeant Harry D. (Pete) Burtis, I believe, fought in Mexico with the 129th Infantry Co. B. (Yes, we’ve been sending troops to the border for a long time.)  Twenty years ago, I had a uniform, hat and binoculars of theirs permanently sealed in a museum-quality frame which hangs in my study. I even have a long wool coat that belong to some member of my father’s family, which is in excellent shape as well. My grandmother gave me a bound copy of The Stars and Stripes dating from February 8, 1918 to June 13, 1919. 

With my  lifelong interest in mind,  I would like to share with you five books about World War I that are amazing works of scholarship and readability:

British novelist Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, a set of three historically-based novels Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993) and The Ghost Road (1995) which covers the war’s effects in Great Britain as well as life on the battlefront. I did a short shout out to her in my book of essays, The Book Shopper: A Life in Review (2009), but you can get a quick sense of the books in this article from The Guardian.

Modris Ecksteins' The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989) put the war in a larger context of how it came about, explains the mindset that led to trench warfare and millions of casualties, and ultimately paved the way to the Second World War II and millions of more casualties. Here’s the original review from The New York Times and a short tribute from a 2014 blog posting. I re-read the book in preparation of a trip to Belgium.

Historian Alastair Horne’s The Price of Glory (1962) an in-depth horrific account of the Battle of Verdun. It was one of my father’s favorite books, and for years I hung on to it. I finally read it and wrote about it here in a 2016 blog posting. My biggest regret is that I never was able to discuss it with him.

Going through this list reminded me that I still haven’t read another classic on the topic, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. I’ll keep you posted.