Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.
“Diana Mosley was a society beauty who fell from grace when she left her husband, brewery heir Bryan Guinness, for Sir Oswald Mosley, an admirer of Mussolini and a notorious womanizer. This horrified her family and scandalized society.
“In a dazzling act of literary license, the novelist and poet Jill Dawson has transformed the sensational true story of Britain’s infamous condemned adulteress into a dramatic novel of passion, murder, and scandal, as seductive as it is shocking.
“With liberal democracy embattled, public discourse grown toxic, family life breaking down, and drug abuse and depression on the rise, many fear what the future holds.
“In Morality, respected faith leader and public intellectual Jonathan Sacks traces today’s crisis to our loss of a strong, shared moral code and our elevation of self-interest over the common good. We have outsourced morality to the market and the state, but neither is capable of showing us how to live. Sacks leads readers from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment to the present day to show that there is no liberty without morality and no freedom without responsibility, arguing that we all must play our part in rebuilding a common moral foundation.
The genre which leasts holds my attention is the mystery/who-dun-it. But Karen recommended this book, saying the evocative period atmosphere and surprising Jewish content made this mystery unusually rewarding.
I’m about half way done with the book and Karen is, of course, right.
“This is an unrivalled account of sixteenth-century warfare, in which Sir Charles Oman traces the dramatic, far-reaching changes in the military strategy, tactics and organization of the period.
“Showing how warfare developed, he covers the Great Wars of 1494-1559; military events in Tudor England, including Henry VIII’s continental wars; the French Wars of Religion, 1562-98; the Dutch revolt and war of independence, 1568-1603; and the Turkish offensive against Christendom, from 1520 until the Peace of Sitva Torok in 1606.