Today’s post brings a pair of reviews I’ve been meaning to put up for a little while.
In A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, you’ll learn the “secret” history of what became the US and Mexico between Columbus’s first voyages in 1492 and the pilgrims arriving in 1621. It follows the adventures of many daring conquistadors as they marched around discovering things, while usually quite unprepared. The book includes the stories of the conquistadors who got lost in Kansas, the land being too even to find landmarks to navigate by, as well as the story of the lost conquistadors who walked across the whole continent and got to the pacific ocean more than 200 years before Lewis and Clark. The book is almost a travelogue, as the author goes to visit many of the places mentioned to try to get a sense of what things would have been like, relating his journey to the reader throughout. I enjoyed this book quite a bit, there is an amazing amount of interesting things that happened that history classes just skipped over.
The other book, which I just finished last week, is Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. I’ve seen a fair bit about North Korea before, so what happened to the North Koreans discussed in the book was not a total surprise. I knew the regime had amazingly strict control over citizen’s lives, and of the collapsed economy and famines. Still, reading the book became rather depressing by the end, even though I didn’t want to put it down so I could read what happened next.
The book follows the lives of a handful of ordinary North Koreans as they endured the country’s fall and the subject’s eventual escape to China and South Korea. The book is laid out in roughly chronological order, switching between the various stories, giving a good picture of what things were like as the North clamped down and the economy collapsed and famine started.
