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{{newreview
|author=Bonnie Greer
|title=Obama Music
|rating=3
|genre=History
|summary=This is an interesting read, but unless I'm missing something, the focus of the book seems a little difficult to grasp. It's best if I start with the author's intentions as set out in her Prologue. It is a mixture of tales of her own life growing up on the South Side, she writes, interspersed with stories and observations about Obama, linking it with the music, musicians and music scene, past and present, including hip hop, country, classical, and rock'n'roll. All of these, she notes, were heard on the President's Inauguration Day. To them she adds the blues, gospel, soul and jazz of the South Side, when the people began to build the great institutions and great solidarity that enabled him to become the most powerful man on the planet.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906558248</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|summary=My good mood evaporated when Sue, my Bookbag partner, asked me if I'd read and review A Journey Through Ruins. She was right to ask because Thatcher's Britain is certainly an area of interest to me. The thing is, times are depressing enough. Margaret Hilda's neo-liberal legacy is crashing around us. Jobless queues are lengthening. Roofs are disappearing from over people's heads. The rampant cronyism and venal nature of our economic and political elites are slowly exposing themselves in ways likely to send my blood pressure soaring.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0199541949</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Grann
|title=The Lost City of Z: A Legendary British Explorer's Deadly Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon
|rating=5
|genre=Biography
|summary=For Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Fawcett there was more to the Amazonian jungle than El Dorado. His target was a treasure of a different nature – a lost city to be discovered because it was a city, not for any spurious material wealth it might hold. Could an entire civilisation have been founded in the inhospitable tracks of rain forest, and left remains he might find fame in locating? As this brilliant biography shows, Fawcett was the best man around to find it.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847374360</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Brian MacArthur
|title=For King and Country: Voices from the First World War
|rating=3
|genre=History
|summary=''For King and Country – Voices from the First World War'' is an anthology of writings edited by Brian MacArthur. It features around 450 pages of journals, poems, articles and memories of those involved in WWI. These factual accounts cover all kinds of styles, lengths and subject matter, but each one is hopefully able to give the reader a real taste of a time most of us are too young to remember first-hand.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0349120293</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nechama Tec
|title=Defiance
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=In this thoroughly researched history, Nechama Tec challenges the notion that European Jews went passively to their deaths during WW2. Instead, she presents us with a history of the activities of the Bielski brothers, headed by the charismatic Tuvia Bielski, which resulted in the saving of around 1,200 Jews who spent the latter part of WW2 hidden in nomadic villages in the forests of western Belorussia. No Jew was turned away by the Bielskis – the camp worked together to provide for the sick, elderly and children. Through mutual cooperation, great bravery and huge physical effort, these Polish Jews survived, turning notions of Jewish passivity on their head.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0195385233</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Thomas Buergenthal
|title=A Lucky Child
|rating=3.5
|genre=History
|summary=I have read a lot of books on the Holocaust and many survivors' tales, as well as biographies and memoirs of those who didn't survive – most famously, ''The Diary of Anne Frank''. So I was very interested to read A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal, who was only ten years old when he was incarcerated in Auschwitz in August 1944.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846681782</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Quentin Letts
|title=50 People Who Buggered Up Britain
|rating=3.5
|genre=History
|summary=In a rather less permissive age, 20 or 30 years ago, I suspect that the author might have been at the top of some people's list of culprits for using that naughty b-word. Good grief, man, you can't possibly have that in a book title, what!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845298551</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nicola Sly
|title=Dorset Murders (True Crime History)
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=Having examined a number of true crime cases from Bristol in her [[Bristol Murders by Nicola Sly|last book]], the author now does the same for largely rural yet not always idyllic Dorset. Twenty two murders, committed between 1818 and 1946, come under the microscope in these pages.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0750951079</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Adrian Desmond and James Moore
|title=Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins
|rating=5
|genre=Popular Science
|summary=This probably won't be the only time you are told through 2009 that it would have been Charles Darwin's 200th birthday this year, and that it is 150 years since ''On The Origin of Species'' first appeared. This book however declares that second anniversary to be slightly of less importance, when you factor in the biggest section of his evolutionary thinking Darwin left out of that book – that of human evolution.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846140358</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Stefan Aust
|title=The Baader-Meinhof Complex
|rating=5
|genre=History
|summary=There are not that many non-fiction books in translation concerning vaguely-remembered foreign terrorist gangs that become eminently faithful, successful and dramatic cinema films, for the simple reason that it would be impossible to make such movies from the great majority of such books. Here, though, it comes across as seeming almost easy.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847920454</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Adam Roberts
|title=The Wonga Coup
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=The chances are that you've never heard of Macias Nguema. You probably don't know his nephew, Obiang Nguema either. They're certainly up there in the Premier League of killing and disappearance, alongside the likes of Pol Pot and modern day tyrants like Robert Mugabe. The fact that the Nguemas are dictators from the tiny west African state of Equatorial Guinea meant they largely slipped off the radar of western consciousness.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846682347</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Megan Hutching
|title=Over the Wide and Trackless Sea: the Pioneer Women and Girls of New Zealand
|rating=3.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=This book offers a valuable insight into the lives of twelve pioneer women who suffered, endured and triumphed in New Zealand.
Their journey by boat from Europe to New Zealand was a long and sometimes perilous one. The European explorers had previously been certain that their destination existed, mainly because they abhorred a vacuum, and couldn't believe there could be such a vast expanse of ocean without the existence of a great land. Some also believed that without a land mass south of the Tropic of Capricorn, the world would be tipped upside down, while others were fearful they would burn up whilst crossing the equator, a myth finally dispelled by the Portuguese voyaging around Africa.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1869507061</amazonuk>
}}
