Category Archives: History (non-fiction)

For this year’s Banned Book Week, I re-read Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir Maus. I discovered this Pulitzer-prize-winning graphic novel some thirty years ago when it was first published in book form*. It was deeply moving and disturbing then, and it … Continue reading →

  On 5 October 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik, and a 14-year-old boy in a coal mining town in West Virginia began a long journey towards being a NASA engineer. Homer H Hickam Jr’s memoir October Sky, originally published under … Continue reading →

Endurance was the name of a ship. The Endurance is the title of a book, American author Caroline Alexander’s spellbinding account of the British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to the Antarctic aboard that ship. On 5 December 1914, the … Continue reading →