Not Built in a Day

 Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire-Emma Southon

Simon & Schuster

Release Date: June 30, 2026

Rating: 📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul he boasted that he killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. This is the truth about the Roman Rome could not function without slavery as it underpinned every single part of their economy. Without the millions of people snatched from their homes in the aftermath of war, kidnapped from the streets, sold into slavery as punishment, or born into it as “home bred slaves”, the Roman empire’s great aqueducts and temples could never have been built. There would be no coins or tiles to find in fields, no limitless manpower for the army and navy that conquered the Mediterranean, no marble palaces or underfloor heating, and certainly no life of unimaginable luxury for the one percent who didn’t even tie their own shoes. For the first time, Not Built in a Day tells their stories.

Not Built in a Day takes readers into the invisible spaces of the Roman empire, where the millions of enslaved lives perpetuated the excesses of the empire that owned them. From the fields of wheat required to give every Roman his daily bread, to the actors and gladiators who provided their circuses; from the guards who kept the streets of Rome safe and the mines which kept Rome a city of gold and marble, to the builders who placed every brick in the Colosseum. It traces how people entered, experienced, and left slavery, covering the little known story of slave revolts and the complex realities of enslaved people who themselves owned enslaved people. Not Built in a Dayalso explores the lives of those freed from slavery, finally able to choose their own destinies.

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I'm a huge fan of historian Emma Southon. She's on my short list of must-buy historians when she has a new book coming out. She questions sources, she gets into the cracks of what archaeology and literature and laws have left us and works out what life would have been like for those who have been left out of so many re-tellings of history with a big H: women (A Rome of One's Own), and in Not Build in a Day, the enslaved population of the Roman Empire. And she does it all with a delightful snarky, irreverent sense of humor. 

As horrifying as Roman slavery was, the layers of complexity thanks to frankly weird laws that meant the empire literally could not survive without a massive enslaved population were fascinting. I had no idea about some of the financial and legal hoops Romans built for themselves. While I knew this was a civilization that was focused on status, I'm not sure I had absorbed just what that meant about daily life: your status had status and could change depending on so many things. This included people in slavery. Enslaved people, freed people and citizens, all had so many levels of status depending on who was involved with what that it must have been exhausting. 

The book breaks down into where people are enslaved (the imperial house, the city, the country, etc.) and the kind of work they are required to do, because that has massive impacts on the experience of the individual.

I can't tell you how much I think this book is a must-read for anyone interested in Roman history. Read it along side all the other histories that look at the big pictures and the big names and forget to tell you about what a Roman's daily life was like. Because this, this was daily life in Rome. You were on one side of the whip or the other, but every single person experienced this in some form every day. 

Wonderfully researched, well written, another triumph for Emma Southon. I can't wait to see where she takes us next. 

Cure for Women

 

The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine THat Changed Women's Lives Forever- Lydia Reeder

St. Martin's Press

Release Date: December 3, 2024

Rating: 📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: After Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school, more women demanded a chance to study medicine. Barred entrance to universities like Harvard, women built their own first-rate medical schools and hospitals. Their success spurred a chilling backlash from elite, white male physicians who were obsessed with eugenics and the propagation of the white race. Distorting Darwin’s evolution theory, these haughty physicians proclaimed in bestselling books that women should never be allowed to attend college or enter a profession because their menstrual cycles made them perpetually sick. Motherhood was their constitution and duty.

Into the midst of this turmoil marched tiny, dynamic Mary Putnam Jacobi, daughter of New York publisher George Palmer Putnam and the first woman to be accepted into the world-renowned Sorbonne medical school in Paris. As one of the best-educated doctors in the world, she returned to New York for the fight of her life. Aided by other prominent women physicians and suffragists, Jacobi conducted the first-ever data-backed, scientific research on women's reproductive biology. The results of her studies shook the foundations of medical science and higher education. Full of larger than life characters and cinematically written, The Cure for Women documents the birth of a sexist science still haunting us today as the fight for control of women’s bodies and lives continues.

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Once Elizabeth Blackwell broke the glass ceiling and became the first women to graduate medical school, more women demanded the chance to study medicine. In America, men did their best to prevent this so women with means traveled to Europe, getting degrees in France and returning to practice and teach other women. In The Cure For Women Lydia Reeder introduces readers to a few of these early medical pioneers and the challenges they faced, then focuses the rest of the book through Mary Putnam and her research, challenges, and advances.

Like many of the early women who were able to travel to Europe to become doctors, Putnam was from a wealthy family (she was the eldest daughter of publisher George Putnam), though money alone never smoothed all her ways. A combination of money, charm, brilliance, stubbornness, and a refusal to fail when she knew she was in the right were the characteristics needed of all of the early women doctors, and Mary had most of these in spades. 

I knew when I started this book I was going to spend a lot of it angry or fustrated by the challenges men placed in the way of women trying to reach their highest potential. I was blown away by the arrogance shown by many of the male doctors in these pages. There are doctors who treat surgery like a grand spectacle to show off their skills, doctors who refuse anesthesia to their female patients for a variety of horrific reasons. Doctors who seem to genuinely believe women aren't capable of the thought necessary for anything because of their menstral cycles, and plenty of men willing to use (and distort) Darwin's theories to promote eugenics for their own ends to control women's bodies. 

It was fascinating to watch doctors like Mary Putnam Jacobi develop theories and entire processes that we now take for granted (like surveys of patients) to begin undertanding and developing new sciences of the time- hygiene, pediatrics, and women's health and gynecology. But more interesting to me was watching them take these sciences and common sense and begin to apply them to the fight for women's rights across a large spectrum of issues, such as voting and education. Jacobi became a proponent of educating women equally to men, preferrably in equal settings, and she worked with all the big names of the era in women's suffrage to fight for the causes she believed in. 

The Cure for Women is overall a really interesting and well-written book, certainly well researched, accessible to everyone. I do wish the author had used more quotes from the writings of Jacobi and the other women involved to help us get more into their heads, but that's my only real complaint. 

For anyone interested in the development of medical science in the nineteenth century, women's education and fight for equality, or readers of Olivia Campbell's Women in White, The Cure for Women is a book to add to the TBR list!

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review 

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The Eagle and the Hart

 

The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Hnry IV- Helen Castor

Penguin

Release Date: October 15, 2024

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: Richard of Bordeaux and Henry of Bolingbroke, cousins born just three months apart, were ten years old when Richard became king of England. They were thirty-two when Henry deposed him and became king in his place. Now, the story behind one of the strangest and most fateful events in English history (and the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s most celebrated history plays) is brought to vivid life by the acclaimed author of Blood and Roses, Helen Castor. 

Richard had birthright on his side, and a profound belief in his own God-given majesty. But beyond that, he lacked all qualities of leadership. A narcissist who did not understand or accept the principles that underpinned his rule, he was neither a warrior defending his kingdom, nor a lawgiver whose justice protected his people. Instead, he declared that “his laws were in his own mouth,” and acted accordingly. He sought to define as treason any resistance to his will and recruited a private army loyal to himself rather than the realm—and he intended to destroy those who tried to restrain him. 

Henry was everything Richard was a leader who inspired both loyalty and friendship, a soldier and a chivalric hero, dutiful, responsible, principled. After years of tension and conflict, Richard banished him and seized his vast inheritance. Richard had been crowned a king but he had become a tyrant, and as a tyrant—ruling by arbitrary will rather than established law—he was deposed by his cousin Henry, the only possible candidate to take his place. Henry was welcomed as a liberator, a champion of the people against his predecessor’s paranoid despotism. But within months he too was facing rebellion. Men knew that a deposer could in turn be deposed, and the new king found himself buffeted by unrest and by chronic ill-health until he seemed a shadow of his former self, trapped by political uncertainty and troubled by these signs that God might not, after all, endorse his actions.

 Captivating, immersive, and highly relevant to today’s times, The Eagle and the Hart is a story about what happens when a ruler prioritizes power over the interests of his own people. When a ruler demands loyalty to himself as an individual, rather than duty to the established constitution, and when he seeks to reshape reality rather than concede the force of verifiable truths. Above all, it is a story about how a nation was brought to the brink of catastrophe and disintegration—and, in the end, how it was brought back.

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I knew the basics about King Richard II and Henry IV, but not much else before reading this book, and The Eagle and the Hart  did an amazing job of explaining the how, why, and who of what I knew, what I didn't know, and all the parts in between if the controversial rule of Richard II and his shocking deposition by Henry Bolingbroke (aka King Henry IV).

This is the first of Helen Castor's books that I've read and she dis an incredible job of breaking down the complicated facts of Richard's government, Parliament, and the rebellions, wars, laws, and everything else going on at the time to make the reader understand what was happening- both from Richard's point of view and everyone else's. She sets up what Richard does at a young age so you understand where he's going as he gets older and more capable of controling things himself. The small amount I'd read before on Richard II focused a lot on scholars debating what kind of mental illnesses he might have had. Castor doesn't do anything like that. She gives his story, how he grew up, what he does and lets you decide about him for yourself. The historical sources seem to suggest he was an incredibly immature, vain, egotistical man who felt all the power belonged with him and no one could tell him what to do. Which became a serious problem for much of England.

Henry gets less of the limelight until the later part of the book, but is equally interesting. I thought studying the two men together made the book really effective and memorable.

 This is the kind of well-researched, meaty book I love to read and will read multiple times, knowing I will get more out of it each time I read it (and hopefully retain more each time). Well written and  excellent for people who know little about the time period or are just looking for a new angle on a subject they already know about, The Eagle and The Hart is just the kind of fabulous work of history I enjoy.

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The Northwomen

 

The Northwomen- Heather Pringle

National Geographic

Release Date: September 10, 2024

Rating: 📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: Until Scandinavia converted to Christianity and came under the rule of powerful kings, the Vikings were a dominant force in the medieval world. Outfitted with wind-powered sailing ships, they left their mark, spreading terror across Europe, sacking cities, deposing kings, and ransacking entire economies. After the Vikings, the world was never the same.

But as much as we know about this celebrated culture, there is a large missing piece: its women. All but ignored by contemporary European writers, these shadowy figures were thought to have played little part in the famous feats of the Vikings, instead remaining at home as wives, mothers, and homemakers.

In this cutting-edge, revisionist portrait, renowned science journalist Heather Pringle turns those assumptions on their head, using the latest archaeological research and historical findings to reveal this group as they actually were. Members of a complex society rich in culture, courage, and a surprisingly modern gender ideology, the women of the Viking age were in fact forces to be reckoned with, serving as: Sorceresses, Warriors, Traders, Artisans, Explorers, Settlers, Landowners, Power brokers, Queens

Both ambitious and compelling, THE NORTHWOMEN is the true story of some of the most captivating figures of the Viking world—and what they reveal about the modern age.

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I'm always interested people who look at history and ask the question: where are the women? Obviously they were there, but women and their stories aren't recorded as often as men, and so are frequently overlooked and forgotten. 

In The Northwomen, journalist Heather Pringle searches for women in Viking world and talks to expert archaeologists who are looking at new (and old) evidence to rewrite what has been "established fact" for so long about the Viking world. 

Pringle does an amazing job here, helping to tell the stories that archaeologists are discovering in ways that laypeople can understand, bringing us into the world of explorers, traders, artisans, raiders, and sorceresses to think about how Viking women could have lived- and when (and if) they might have held power in that world.   

I loved how archaologically focused this book was, making the world very concrete and evidence based. One of my favorite chapters, surprisingly, was on weavers. Pringle interviewed people who have been studying and actually re-creating as much as possible the original Viking weaving methods, and used them to help make a woolen sail for a recreated Viking ship. The amount of work that went into the project and what they learned about the work the women would have done was amazing, and really captured me. There were even descriptions of woolen 'armor' that men would have worn when going into battle- in much of the world, not just among the Vikings! And all of it would have been created by women. 

Pringle doesn't try to completely rehabilitate the Vikings as a people, but recognizes the negative aspects of their society as well as the positive. She talks about them as a slave trading society (as were most societies of their day) and does a really interesting comparison to modern psychological studies in the slave trade to try to understand what it would have been like for women who were subjected to this. 

Overall, The Northwomen was a wonderfully written, well researched book that makes the latest archaeological research on women in the Viking world accessible to anyone who is interested in finding out about it. I definitely recommend this book!

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

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Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party

 

Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures & Accidentally Upended the World- Edward Dolnick

Scribner

Rating: 📚📚

Synopsis: In the early 1800s the world was a safe and cozy place. But then a twelve-year-old farm boy in Massachusetts stumbled upon a row of fossilized three-toed footprints the size of dinner plates—the first dinosaur tracks ever found. Soon, in England, Victorians unearthed enormous bones—bones that reached as high as a man’s head. 

Outside of myths and fairy tales, no one had imagined that creatures like three-toed giants once lumbered across the land. And if anyone conjured up such a scene, they would never imagine that all those animals could have vanished hundreds of millions years ago. The thought of sudden, arbitrary disappearance from life was unnerving and forced the Victorians to rethink everything they knew about the world. Celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads readers through a compelling true adventure as the paleontologists of the first half of the 19th century puzzled their way through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we know today.

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If you're looking for a carefully explained, well-thoughtout, and logical, chronological explanation of how the Victorians accidentally created paleontology, discovered dinosaurs, and rethought everything they knew about the world- this is not that book.

If you're just interested enough in the idea of discovering dinosaurs where the world had never acknowledged them before, and wondering how Victorian science dealt with that, where any book is a good starter, then Dolnick is probably as good a start as any.

I am by no means an expert on dinosaurs. But I'm a huge reader of everything related to Victorian history and hadn't come across a book devoted to describing the fossil craze of the Victorian period and how it changed the scientific thought process. So the title hooked me. From Mary Anning to William Buckland to Richard Owen, this book introduces you to the English (and one or two French) who thrilled in hunting fossils or those happier in museums trying to understand fossils. It explains the original Victorian view that nature, science, and religion all fit happily together. Fossils and the startling idea of dinosaurs began to erode those views, despite how hard a few clung to them. Before Darwin threw his new explanation of evolution onto the scene, people were already prepared for the change in thinking he was suggesting.

My problem wasn't the more simplistic approach Dolnick took in his explanations or way of writing. Everyone has their own style and the reader can get used to it if the story is good. Or the number of times he would lament about how if only those early scientists had had access to the kinds of equipment etc. that modern scientists have. Which seemed like kind of the point to me. When you're discovering something, you work with what you have. It was the unbelieveable amount of repetition in the book. Read a chapter and then had to take a break for a few days? No problem, you could read the next one and not have missed anything. Different words, saying exactly the same thing. It was like he couldn't figure out what version of a chapter he liked better, so he just left them all in. Occasionally new things would come in, a new person would be introduced, etc. Then they would get the same repeat treatment, hammering away at the reader until I had to skim sections to be able to move forward at all. By the time we got to the famous dinner party in the Crystal Palace dinosaur statues I was pretty numb to all of it.  

Overall, a fantastic idea for a research idea and book, very poorly and repetitiously executed. Definitely made me not want to pick up another book by this author, but did make me interested enough to look through his biblioghraphy to see if anyone had done a better job of writing on the subject.

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review 

The Demon of Unrest

 

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War- Erik Larson

Crown

Release Date: April 30, 2024

Rating: 📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston: Fort Sumter. 

Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”
 
At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between both. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous Secretary of State, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable—one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.
 
Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink—a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.

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Erik Larson, known for Devil in the White City and The Splendid and the Vile, among many others, this time takes on Fort Sumter and trying to understand (and explain) the root causes behind the American Civil War.

Americans may think they know the basics: Lincoln got elected, South Carolina seceded, Fort Sumter was fired on, there was a war. But Larson takes us into the deeply human and often tragic months between Lincoln getting elected and the firing on Fort Sumter. Were there moments when things could have been different? When different choices could have caused massively different outcomes?

The surprising truth is that, as Larson shows us, Northerners and Southerners as a whole did not understand each other. And had not for decades-if ever. The Southern aristocrats who made up the politicians most Northerners met with were hot-tempered, extremely proud, and always on alert to having their honor offended at the slightest provocation. And they had largely managed to convince themselves that there was nothing wrong with slavery. So the louder abolitionists in the North became, the more offended the South became. Abolitionists said the institution of slavery was evil, Southerners heard that they themselves were evil.

Add to this hot-heads who had been arguing that Southern states should have separated from the Union for decades, and the situation had been rife for rebellion longer than many were willing to admit. One person who doesn't come out of Demon looking good is outgoing President Buchanan. Buchanan acts oblivious to everything until he can't avoid it any longer (I particularly loved a quote by Georgia representative Toombs who tells Buchanan he's been in the midst of a revolution for over a year, he just hasn't noticed it.). His only goal is to get to Inauguration Day without violence so he can dump the problems on Lincoln and any states that leave happen under Lincoln's watch instead of his. But when South Carolina seceded letters show partying Southerners go to the White House, assuming Buchanan will be happy as well. There's no record of whether Buchanan partied too, but the fact that Southerners in Washington assumed he was on their side did not help issues moving forward. The level that rumors and misunderstandings played in politics of the day was surprising to me.

Reading about the experiences of the people in Fort Sumter itself were some of the most interesting parts for me. Major Anderson, conflicted between his natural feelings for his home in the South and his sworn oath to the US Army (a conflict many military men would have to deal with)- on top of having to make a lot of decisions himself that he shouldn't have had to make, was especially someone I felt for. He knew pretty early on his decisions had the real potential to spark a war if he wasn't careful, and he had almost no feedback from his superiors to help guide him. He was in a no-win situation and I expect plenty of people would have surrended the fort a lot sooner than he did. His sections of the book helped explain a question I never knew I had: what made Fort Sumter so important and such a flash point that we connect it with the start of the war? 

I had a little trouble getting into Demon at first- possibly because when I started it I could only read small sections at a time and I think the beginning of the book would benefit from reading in a large chunk in one sitting to really get into it. There are a lot of people to get to know and some time traveling to get really settled into understanding the 1860 "present" (Larson backs up and gives up some pre-1860 Southern history so we understand where the Southern mindset is and that the idea of seceding isn't something new to them). But once I got settled in the book I really enjoyed it, because there was so much behind-the-scenes history Larson was showing me that I hadn't known about before. As always, Larson uses letters, diaries, and other first-hand accounts to make the events spring to life for the reader- which I love.

While not his best book in my opinion, The Demon of Unrest is an excellent, well-researched book that Larson's fans should enjoy. Full of the drama, pathos, and absolute humanity that draws you into an excellent history book.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

     

Power and Glory

 Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty- Alexander Larman

St. Martin's Press

Release Date: April 30, 2023

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: When the Royal Family took to the balcony of Buckingham Palace on VE Day in 1945, they knew that the happiness and excitement of the day was illusory. Britain may have been victorious in a painful war, but the peace would be no easier. Between the abdication crisis, the death of King George VI, and the ascension of young Elizabeth II to the throne, the continued existence of the monarchy seemed uncertain. And the presence of the former Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, conniving and sniping from the sidelines in an attempt to regain relevance, even down to writing a controversial and revelatory memoir, could only make matters worse. Still, the question of whether or not Elizabeth could succeed and make the monarchy something that once again inspired international pride and even love remained.

In Power and Glory, Alexander Larman completes his acclaimed Windsor family trilogy, using rare and previously unseen documents to illuminate their unique family dynamic. Through his chronicling of events like the Royal Wedding, George VI’s death and the discovery of the Duke of Windsor’s treacherous activities in WWII, Larman paints a vivid portrait of the end of one sovereign’s reign and the beginning of another’s that heralded a new Elizabethan Age which would bring power and glory back to a monarchy desperately in need of it.

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Book 3 in his carefully researched trilogy, "Power and Glory" is Alexander Larman's conclusion to the saga of King Edward VIII and King George VI of England. The first two books followed the death of their father, King George V and the abdication crisis as Edward (David to the family) abdicated his responsibilities to the throne, meaning his younger brother (Bertie in the family) had to become king. It ended up being the best thing that could happen for England, even if the stress and strain of the job probably helped kill him. Book two follows World War 2 and Bertie leading England while David flits around being thoughtless at best, a Nazi sympathizer and possibly quite a bit more. 

Book 3, "Power and Glory" is the immediate aftermath of the war. England is dealing with economic crisis and a shrinking empire, George VI is trying to deal with local crisis as well as the rise of Communist Russia and his own failing health. Elizabeth is growing up, falling in love with Phillip, and marrying him despite some push back. I was saddened by reading exactly how ill George VI was and how much he suffered, but the rest of that part of the story didn't hold my attention too much. What I very much enjoyed was when the story would switch to David and Wallis.

Trying desperately to hold on to some level of power or relevance in the world, David and Wallis try to get the crown to have the former king made a kind of ambassador so he can have social parties and get the government to pay for them (and not pay taxes). Surprisingly, the government declines this offer. So they start trying to see what kind of trouble they can cause.

Probably a tragic-comedy if they weren't so thoroughly dislikable, the detailed research into David and Wallis' actions and how the British government and the Royal family had to deal with them were by far my favorite parts of this book, and I'd recommend it for that alone. If you're interested in Britain post WW2, this is a good place to start. 

As always, thoroughly researched and generally well written, if occasionally given to more "if they only knew then"type of chapter endings than I prefer, Larman's "Power and Glory" is a solid conclusion to his trilogy on the Windsor family and Great Britain and their combined experiences in World War II. 

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Hunting the Falcon

 Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and the Marriage that Shook Europe- John Guy & Julia Fox

Bloomsbury

Released: September 14, 2023

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: The story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn is one of the most remarkable in a long courtship followed by a shotgun wedding and then a coronation, ending just short of three years later when a husband's passion turned to such hatred that he simply wanted his wife gone. In Hunting the Falcon, John Guy and Julia Fox examine the most recent archival discoveries and peel back layers of historical myth to present Anne and Henry in startlingly new ways. They show how Anne and Henry's relationship was tied almost completely to the major events of international politics at one of the great turning points of European history, and dispel any assumptions that a sixteenth-century woman, even a queen, could exert little influence on the politics and beliefs of a patriarchal society. Anne was in fact a shrewd and ruthless politician in her own right, a woman who steered Henry and his policies - and whom Henry seriously contemplated making joint sovereign.

Hunting the Falcon sets the facts and some completely new finds into a wide frame, unearthing the truth about these two extraordinary lives and their tumultuous times. It pays particular attention to the seven 'missing' years that Anne spent in France, and explores how she organised her side of the royal court in novel ways that ultimately sowed the seeds of her own downfall. In this feat of historical research and analysis, Guy and Fox offer a sumptuous retelling of one of the most consequential marriages in history and an exhilarating portrait of love, lust, politics and power.

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I've read a number of biographies on Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn recently, and Hunting the Falcon has to be right up at the top. I love how historians John Guy and Julia Fox take the wide view of the relationship. It wasn't ever just about love, or even lust, it was always about power and politics- both on the small family scale and on the European scale.

Guy and Fox do an excellent job of describing Anne's life in Europe before coming to Katherine of Aragon's court and Henry's attention, and how what she learned there greatly influenced what she herself would do when she was queen. She modeled her court on Queen Claude, who she served in France, allowing both women and men into her court. This probably allowed her access to more information than she might otherwise have gotten, certainly made her feel more accessible to those who wanted to ask for favors and knew the Queen was the one to go to, and in the end, helped Cromwell exploit chinks in Anne's armor that led to her execution. We see what Anne did as queen for those around her, the changes she made and those she tried, but failed, to make.  

But more than focusing on the power Anne wielded in England, Guy and Fox help the reader understand the ever-shifting power plays going on between England and France, the pope and Charles (Katherine of Aragon's nephew, Holy Roman Emperor, Hapsburg emperor, etc.). Who sided with who, when, where, and why changed regularly and Guy and Fox do the best job of explaining the players and their motivations (at any given time) that I've read yet. I think that was what impressed me the most in Hunting the Falcon. I always knew that Anne was pro-French, but here we get deeply into why sometimes it was to Henry's advantage to side with Francis and France, other times with Charles, who might support him against the pope, and who's wars in Europe would benefit him the most.

Whether you think you know all there is to know about Henry and Anne, or are looking for a good book to start your exploration of this explosive relationship, Hunting the Falcon is definitely a book I recommend!

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes

 

The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes- Kate Strasdin

Chatto & Windus/Vintage/Pegasus

Release Date: February 23, 2023

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of her life and times. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes.

Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Strasdin spent the next six years unravelling the secrets contained within the album's pages.

Piece by piece, she charts Anne's journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore before tracing her return to England in later years. Fragments of cloth become windows into Victorian life: pirates in Borneo, the complicated etiquette of mourning, poisonous dyes, the British Empire in full swing, rioting over working conditions and the terrible human cost of Britain's cotton industry.

This is life writing that celebrates ordinary people: the hidden figures, the participants in everyday life. Through the evidence of waistcoats, ball gowns and mourning outfits, Strasdin lays bare the whole of human experience in the most intimate of mediums: the clothes we choose to wear.

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This was a book I was excited to read since I first heard about it through social media. Author and fashion historian Kate Strasdin was given an album, a 'dress diary' in 2016. The album consisted of swatches of fabrics from the 1830s through about the 1870s and, with the exception of brief captions identifying the fabric in a way only the album's creator would have recognized, there was no writing. Strasdin spent years researching the people named in the captions and the stories she could connect to them and their fabrics. The result is the fascinating book The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes: Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe (called The Dress Diary: Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe in the US). 

Anne Sykes grew up in Lancashire, the daughter of a cloth merchant in a part of England focused at the time on the cloth industry. She married a cloth merchant from a family of fabric printers, so needless to say Anne understood the importance of fabric in daily life- both as fashion, gifts, and probably the basis for family economics. Anne and her husband Adam traveled to Singapore for his work and lived there (and briefly Shanghai) for nearly ten years before returning to England. Strasdin scoured records, newspapers, ship's logs and more for hints of the Sykes and other names that appear in Anne's diary, often with surprising success. While no letters have been found from Anne, Strasdin helps us discover what her life in Singapore might have been like through letters of other women who lived there at the time, and who knew Anne and donated fabric to her album.

But this book isn't just a biography of a middle-class cloth merchant's wife. It is a history of the textiles and fashion in England during Anne's lifetime. From the textile mills of northern England to the machines that increased production and put hundreds of employees out of work; to a chapter on how the patterns were created (which I'd always wondered about!) and how the printing of cloth changed over time; the change in colors with the discovery of aniline dyes in the 1850s and 1860s (along with the associated poisons for both the workers and occasionally the wearers of the material); and the fancy dress costume balls that became the rage in both England and Singapore, Strasdin connects each chapter of fashion history to swatches of fabric in Anne's diary. The fabric acts as a starting point in each chapter for something Anne would have known about or been affected by, from mourning clothes to Singaporean pirates (there's a piece of a pirate flag in the album that an admiral gave her!)

The Dress Diary of Anne Sykes and Kate Strasdin proves beyond a doubt that fashion history stands as a part of the social history of any time period that must be considered when we truly try to know a time and place. Women were hugely influential in the choices connected to fashion, letting us find some of their stories within the shadows of "important" history as so often focused on by men, but Strasdin reminds us in this book of the huge web of social and global economic influences a phrase like "fashion history" truly means. Not something to be scoffed at, it is a growing field of study that should be both celebrated and encouraged.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the social or fashion history of the Victorian era. It is a great adventure that Strasdin allows us to share along with her.

Empress of the Nile

 Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt's Ancient Temples From Destruction- Lynne Olson

Random House

Release Date: February 28, 2023

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: In the 1960s, the world’s attention was focused on a nail-biting race against time: Fifty countries contributed nearly a billion dollars to save a dozen ancient Egyptian temples, built during the height of the pharaohs’ rule, from drowning in the floodwaters of the massive new Aswan High Dam. But the extensive press coverage at the time overlooked the gutsy French archaeologist who made it all happen. Without the intervention of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the temples would now be at the bottom of a vast reservoir. It was an unimaginably large and complex project that required the fragile sandstone temples to be dismantled, stone by stone, and rebuilt on higher ground.

A willful real-life version of Indiana Jones, Desroches-Noblecourt refused to be cowed by anyone or anything. During World War II she joined the French Resistance and was held by the Nazis; in her fight to save the temples she challenged two of the postwar world’s most daunting leaders, Egypt’s President Nasser and France’s President de Gaulle. As she told a reporter, “You don’t get anywhere without a fight, you know.”

Yet Desroches-Noblecourt was not the only woman who played an essential role in the historic endeavor. The other was Jacqueline Kennedy, who persuaded her husband to call on Congress to help fund the rescue effort. After years of Western plunder of Egypt’s ancient monuments, Desroches-Noblecourt did the opposite. She helped preserve a crucial part of Egypt’s cultural heritage, and made sure it remained in its homeland.

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Historian Lynne Olson, best known for her fantastic books on little known aspects of World War II history,  (Last Hope Island) gives us another little known but hugely influential story in Empress of the Nile. Along the lines of Madame Fourcade's Secret War, Empress of the Nile focuses on a Frenchwoman- Christine Desroches-Noblecourt, a resistance fighter during World War II. But what I thought would be the most interesting part of her story ended up being only a small part, and by no means the most fascinating.

Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt was fascinated by Egypt from a young age and was fortunate enough to have parents who supported her in following her dreams. She became the first female archaeologist and Egyptologist in France, facing incredible hostility from the men in her field, who didn't want her on dig sites. They disliked her presence in general, her talent and intelligence, her familiarity and positive working relationship with the local Egyptian workers, and her successes. When not on a dig in Egypt she was working at the Louvre. As the Nazi threat began to loom, the Louvre packed up its treasures and shipped them to different places for protection, with Christiane helping catalog, pack, and transport the Egyptian collections. She remained in Paris during the occupation and was part of the first resistance group against the Nazis, a fascinating collection of men and women who were mostly museum workers but were able to help hide escaping POWs in their museums and get them to safety, among many other things. When Christiane was arrested, questioned, and then released by Nazi officers she knew she would be under surveillance and backed away from the group to keep her friends in the movement safe. While I thought this early part of her life would have been the most fascinating, what really captivated me was what came after the war. Christiane worked with Egyptian officials, UNESCO, and other agencies during the 1960s to save Abu Simbel, the Temple at Philae, and other priceless monuments from being lost to flooding with the building of the new Aswan High Dam. She was the visionary and the driving force behind the effort, even though she received little credit then or now. It was Desroches-Noblecourt who brought experts and professionals from around the world together to work on a project with no political motivation, just pure desire to save archaeological treasures for the good of humankind.

Lynne Olson describes the race to save Abu Simbel, the Temple of Philae, and the other endangered monuments in breathtaking details that leave the reader's heart racing, desperate to find out what will happen next and how they will succeed. What will go wrong? How will they triumph? What political disasters will get in the way? The reader feels some of what Desroches-Noblecourt must have felt as she worked nonstop to save the temples. Along the way I learned a lot about the politics of Egypt, from when France and England took over during the 1800s through the 1960s and how the world's politics affected Egyptology. And how this can be overcome when a few voices prove what really matters.  

Empress of the Nile is a fascinating story of the little known life of Christiane Desroche-Noblecourt and her life long dedication to discovering, interpreting, and preserving Egypt's past. Carefully researched and beautifully written, this is the story of a strong and dedicated woman who inspired generations of archaeologists, and should inspire future generations of people to go for their dreams, no matter how impossible they seem. Because sometimes, you can move mountains.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

 

Before Mrs. Beeton

Before Mrs. Beeton: Elizabeth Raffald, England's Most Influential Housekeeper- Neil Buttery

Pen & Sword Books

Release Date: February 28, 2023

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis:  The great Elizabeth Raffald used to be a household name, and her list of accomplishments would make even the highest of achievers feel suddenly impotent. After becoming housekeeper at Arley Hall in Cheshire at age twenty-five, she married and moved to Manchester, transforming the Manchester food scene and business community, writing the first A to Z directory and creating the first domestic servants registry office, the first temping agency if you will. Not only that, she set up a cookery school and ran a high class tavern attracting both gentry and nobility. 

These achievements gave her notoriety and standing in Manchester, but it all pales in comparison to her biggest achievement; her cookery book The Experienced English Housekeeper. Published in 1769, it ran to over twenty editions and brought her fame and fortune.

But then disaster; her fortune lost, spent by her alcoholic husband. Bankrupted twice, she spent her final years in a pokey coffeehouse in a seedy part of town.

Her book, however, lived on. Influential and often imitated (but never bettered), it became the must-have volume for any kitchen, and it helped form our notion of traditional British food as we think of it today.

To tell Elizabeth’s tumultuous rise and fall story, historian Neil Buttery doesn’t just delve into the history of food in the eighteenth century, he has to look at trade and empire, domestic service, the agricultural revolution, women’s rights, publishing and copyright law, gentlemen’s clubs and societies, the horse races, the defeminization of midwifery, and the paranormal, to name but a few.

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Before Mrs. Beeton, there was Elizabeth Raffald, a one woman powerhouse who worked hard to become an incredible success, and deserves to be far more well known than she is today. Elizabeth began as a servant, worked her way up to (a surprisingly young) housekeeper, and after marrying John Raffald moved to Manchester where she had a confectioner's shop, catered fine meals, built a servant's hiring agency, wrote a best-selling cookery book based on the idea that the developing middle-class and servants (housekeepers etc.) wanted to know the best ways to economically cook excellent meals, plain meals, fancy desserts, and everything in between. 

This book does a really great job of giving the reader a good feel for where Elizabeth is historically and socially- she works to build up her social status and wealth without ever shocking the society around her. She plays by the rules, but she has a brilliant sense for business opportunities and timing that allow her to become an incredibly influential woman in Manchester, and author Neil Buttery argues, brings Manchester up with her. There is excellent additional research on life in eighteenth century England at different levels of society, the changes England's global empire were making back home, wonderful information on what it was like being a servant in these changing times when so many were leaving the country for city life, fascinating food history, and more. We get to see some of Elizabeth's recipes with modern adjustments in case anyone is adventurous enough to try them at home, and more.

As people once again become interested in food history and the people connected to making important contributions to national food as we might still know it today, Elizabeth Raffald will surely become a more known and celebrated name. This well-written and well-researched book will hopefully help to play a part in getting the word out. I'm certainly glad I found it!!

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review