book reviews

Possibly the last set of the year! Too bad it's not more exciting ...

Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science - One of Collins's lesser works, in my opinion. While some characters do grow and develop, many of the main characters seem to undergo either no change at all or they change instantaneously for no reason. I didn't see science taking much of a role in the book, despite the author's desire to have it seem so. Definitely not a keeper.

Craig A. Monson, Nuns Behaving Badly - This was a story born of the author's research into music in early Italian convents. As he read in the Papal library, he kept stumbling on stories of nuns behaving in unusual ways, and eventually decided to do a book based on the stories he found. It's a very entertaining read - easily followable by someone with only a casual interest in medieval times or convents, and the characters are very well fleshed out from the extant records. I enjoyed it a great deal.

Webb Garrison, Amazing Women of the Civil War - This compilation of character sketches was a sad disappointment. Written in a very juvenile style, jumping to conclusions not supported by the evidence, getting facts wrong ... I would have liked to read the same book but with more detail and better research behind it.

Kyle Ward, History in the Making - This book has a great premise - studying history texts' coverage of major events in American history, and how the reporting and interpretation of those events has changed. Unfortunately, the author's notes made it clear that he was choosing his texts in order to bolster his own definitions of events, and as such, I found the notes really skewed the whole book and made me less interested in the premise.