The 2021 Nonfiction Challenge Part X: Heroes and Villains in October

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The 2021 Nonfiction Challenge Part X: Heroes and Villains in October

1Chatterbox
Oct 2, 2021, 4:53 pm

Again, apologies for the delay in posting. I was in NYC on Thursday, and an 18 hour day for that, plus walking 5 miles, plus only 2 hours sleep on Weds night, wiped me out completely yesterday!

But here I am, and here's the OCTOBER CHALLENGE!

Read a nonfiction book about a hero or a villain. Or someone who might be villainous might have heroic aspects. Or be a hero with feet of clay. Or someone you see as a hero while others don't, or vice versa. Or a book that blends the stories of heroes and villains. I plan to finish Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder, a chronicle of the Holocaust which has a lot of villains but also a few heroes (too few...) I may also revisit Villa Air-Bel, which is a related story featuring Varian Fry in Marseilles during the Vichy years -- he's a flawed human being who in a brief moment of time acted very heroically, if not always as heroically as he wanted to.

It's a topic that sets the stage for a lot of interesting debate. What makes someone heroic? Is it there achievements or their personalities? Their moral authority or their 'greatness'? The people who, a century or two centuries ago, we described as heroes (think, Alexander the Great) are viewed through a different prism today. Not to mention Robert E. Lee. And sometimes, heroic achievements in one area (eg creativity) is undermined by being abusive or even criminal in one's personal life.

Have fun, everyone!!

2Chatterbox
Oct 2, 2021, 4:54 pm

On the horizon:

NOVEMBER: BUSINESS, THE ECONOMY AND BIG POLICY QUESTIONS
Kind of a catch-all category. By this point in 2021, we should have some idea of what the post-pandemic economy will look like. So, read any book about economic or business issues, and the policy questions that they create for politicians and citizens. From data security to minimum living wages, to the stock market.

DECEMBER: GO ANYWHERE!
A perennial. And a great place for that quirky, one-of-a-kind nonfiction book that simply doesn't fit anywhere else.

Hard to believe that another year has almost evaporated...

3m.belljackson
Oct 2, 2021, 5:05 pm

Hi - I'll be reading The Slave Who Freed Haiti: The life of TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE.

How welcome it would be if his vision of Peace and his hard won Freedom had lasted.

4benitastrnad
Oct 2, 2021, 5:27 pm

I will be reading about villains. I am going to read Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby by Candida R. Moss. The Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby, were in the news in September. They were forced to return some ancient cuneiform tablets to Iraqi because they were stolen. The Greens purchased them, even though they knew they were stolen, and put them into their Bible Museum in Washington, D.C. One of the family has been charged in the case. It is not the first time this family has run afoul of international antiquities laws, so I decided that I should learn more about them and why they continue to defy laws of all kinds.

5cbl_tn
Oct 2, 2021, 6:19 pm

I will be reading a biography of Daniel Boone. It's self-serving, since branches of my family followed the same migration patterns as the Boones.

6kac522
Oct 2, 2021, 6:59 pm

I'll be reading a biography of Benjamin Disraeli, who was a statesman, politician, Prime Minister of England, and novelist in the 19th century. I believe he was a public figure who caused a great deal of controversy--to some he was a hero, to others a villain.

7alcottacre
Modifié : Oct 3, 2021, 12:09 am

I am going to read Unstoppable by Joshua M. Greene, a biography of a Holocaust survivor, Siggi Wilzig, who came to the United States a penniless immigrant and became a "Wall Street Legend," according to the book's cover.

8Jackie_K
Oct 3, 2021, 12:13 pm

I'm hopefully going to finish my choice for this month's challenge today or tomorrow - I'm going for a straight down the line hero (can't be doing with horrible people right now!) and am reading I Am Malala, by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb.

9m.belljackson
Oct 3, 2021, 1:05 pm

"L'Ouverture" The Slave Who Freed Haiti
translates as "the opening."

The author is unsure of how he chose this name,
while the book, for the 1950s time it was written, is pretty amazing.

It's a good introduction to inspire more recent research.

10Familyhistorian
Oct 4, 2021, 6:13 pm

I'm reading The Last Days of Richard III. People have debated whether he was a villain or not for centuries.

11fuzzi
Oct 5, 2021, 8:14 am

>10 Familyhistorian: Sharon Kay Penman does a wonderful job fleshing out who Richard III was in The Sunne in Splendour. I highly recommend it.

12Jackie_K
Oct 5, 2021, 11:54 am

And that's me finished I am Malala. It's impossible not to be impressed and inspired by her and her family. I liked that she didn't focus much on being shot - the shooting and its aftermath, including being airlifted to the UK for treatment, only take up the final quarter of the book. Prior to that, she details both the deterioration in politics and civil society in Pakistan, and the campaigning that she and her father in particular did about girls' education, but also it feels like a lot of the book is a love letter to the Swat Valley, which of course the family have not been able to return to since she was shot.

13alcottacre
Oct 5, 2021, 4:09 pm

>10 Familyhistorian: Adding that one to the BlackHole. I have a couple of books on Richard III, but they are older so I would like a more modern take on the man.

14Chatterbox
Oct 5, 2021, 7:58 pm

>10 Familyhistorian: I think with Ashdown-Hill as author, the answer will be "hero". That said, we'll never know the answer to the crucial question of what happened to the boys. Personally, I think that minions of one or another king took it upon themselves to remove a potential problem. Was the king involved? if it happened in Richard's day, I would suggest not (though he could certainly be ruthless). If Henry VII, I would say quite possibly he knew ahead of time, or suspected.

I'm reading a new book, The Irish Assassins about the Phoenix Park Murders in Dublin. Again, a hero/villain dichotomy. To Irish nationalists, the assassins were heroes; to the British, villains. It all depends on one's POV.

15Familyhistorian
Oct 5, 2021, 8:17 pm

>11 fuzzi: The Sunne in Splendour has been recommended to me before but I haven't read it yet. Thanks for reminding me.

>13 alcottacre: It is a quite modern take on the story as it includes the search for his DNA relatives after he was dug up.

>14 Chatterbox: It is a very murky part of history not helped by the historians contemporary to events writing about a defeated king and trying to stay on the good side of the new king. A lot of my interest stems from the DNA aspect of the story and from having visited Leicestershire where I found out more about the discovery of his body.

16Chatterbox
Oct 5, 2021, 11:27 pm

>15 Familyhistorian: It really is an astonishing story. To be able to identify him and then give him an honorable burial after all those centuries... I suppose there was a similar breaking point in history around the time of the Norman invasion in 1066, but there aren't any mysteries surrounding what happened. Just a heck of a lot of bloodshed. (I read Marc Morris' book on the Anglo Saxon kings and his book about the Norman invasion earlier this year...)

17PaulCranswick
Oct 6, 2021, 1:30 am

>16 Chatterbox: As a Yorkist I can give a wholehearted thumbs up to Sunne in Splendour.

I am presently reading The Face of Battle which is chock full of heroes amid a gaggle of villains.

18benitastrnad
Modifié : Oct 6, 2021, 10:46 am

I am going to start on my villains book today. It is Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby by Candida R. Moss. This book is about the Green family. They own the world's largest chain of stores providing hobby supplies. They are also a fundamentalist Christian family and are the creators of the Museum of the Bible. They are currently embroiled in an art and antiquities smuggling scandal in which family members knowingly purchased stolen artifacts from Middle Eastern countries and from Italy. This book was written prior to the court settlement but should provide me with some background information.

I also hope to read a heroes book this month. I have Thieves of Baghdad: One Marine's Passion for Ancient Civilizations and the Journey to Recover the World's Greatest Stolen Treasures by Matthew Bogdanos picked out. This book is about the U. S. Marine Colonel who lead the investigation into the looting of the Iraq National Museum in 2003 and has since become a U. S. District Attorney in New York who specializes in art and antiquities theft.

19benitastrnad
Oct 6, 2021, 10:38 am

>17 PaulCranswick:
I have had a copy of Face of Battle since the late 1970's and have never read it. I have read other books by Keegan but not this one and it is probably his most famous book.

20LizzieD
Oct 6, 2021, 1:54 pm

I'm reading The Splendid and the Vile, Churchill in 1941. If my friend finishes and lends me Peril, I might read that one.

21annushka
Oct 6, 2021, 8:29 pm

>20 LizzieD: I read The Splendid and the Vile and liked it a lot.

22LizzieD
Oct 6, 2021, 11:51 pm

>21 annushka: Good to know, annushka..... I sort of thought "one more WWII book about the Blitz,* but Larson has a way of drawing his reader in.

23Chatterbox
Oct 8, 2021, 2:34 pm

Well, finished my first book for this challenge, The Irish Assassins. About the Phoenix Park Murders in the early 1880s, but it combines the crime details with a nuanced explanation of the debate over Irish home rule, the horror that was visited on Ireland during British rule, and the evolution of more violent rebels, the forerunners to Sinn Fein and the IRA. This was interesting to read in light of all that I've read about various 19th century groups using dynamite and bombs (anarchists, Russians, as well as 'Fenians') And while it's full of villains, it indirectly challenges our thinking about what 'villains' are in a complex situation. Is someone who commits a political murder but who may not have been violent had he not seen members of his family starve to death or be tossed off their land a villain? Yes, but also not really. Are the victims automatically heroic? Not really, but Julie Kavanagh makes them sound as if they were victims not just of violence but of an unjust system that they either were or felt powerless to change. Anyone with strong/inflexible views about Britain and the Irish likely will feel lukewarm about this one (I ended up feeling as disgusted with extremists on both sides) but it's a thoughtful and comprehensive book about these events that puts them in context, which all too often is lost. It's also human.

24benitastrnad
Oct 13, 2021, 3:31 pm

I DID it folks! I finished my last August book. Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt. I have been stuck on the last chapter for about 2 weeks and last night decided to finish it. I haven't written a review of it yet, but I will and will post it over on that thread. It was a good book and I will say that on my recent weekend trip I found myself doing several of the things that both of my books from August urged drivers not to do. I found myself wondering what that says about me?

25alcottacre
Oct 13, 2021, 3:57 pm

>23 Chatterbox: (I ended up feeling as disgusted with extremists on both sides)

I have a feeling I would be the same way, Suzanne.

>24 benitastrnad: Congratulations on finishing the book, Benita!

26jessibud2
Modifié : Oct 13, 2021, 4:24 pm

I have really fallen off the wagon with this challenge but I just finished a book that I realize can count for this Heroes and Villains month. Although I think the book was written for a young audience, it was still very informative. She Came to Slay, the life and times of Harriet Tubman, most certainly counts as a hero. Not being American, I did not know nearly as much about Tubman's life as I thought I did. I like how the book was laid out, too. A really detailed (as much as was possible to know) family tree going back to her parents', as well as photos, illustrations, and reproductions of various documents. I like how the author was clear about what she was able to ascertain as fact and what she was not. That Tubman lived into her 90s, and managed to accomplish all she did, is nothing short of remarkable. Her escape from slavery and her Underground Railroad successes, her stint in the army as a nurse and a spy (for which she had to fight for decades to be financially compensated), her work for civil rights and suffrage, her founding of a care home for aged and impoverished Black seniors. The author even told of Tubman being scammed in a money-for-gold scheme! Heartbreaking. And... all these accomplishments, while remaining illiterate throughout her life.

The very last page showed a new twenty dollar bill with Tubman on it, that Barack Obama apparently signed off on. It was supposed to be issued this year (or last), I think but apparently there are now no plans for that to happen until 2028. Why would that be?! As with so much else, it makes no sense.

27alcottacre
Oct 13, 2021, 6:29 pm

>26 jessibud2: Well, if I did not have that one in the BlackHole already, I would be adding it.

28benitastrnad
Oct 13, 2021, 6:52 pm

Because I finished reading Traffic I started Thieves of Baghdad today. It will be my heroes book and is by Matthew Bogdanos (there is a ghost writer) and is his memoir about his time working to recover the stolen artifacts from the Iraqi National Museum. So far it seems a bit ponderous with him describing absolutely every detail and using lots of words to do it, but it interesting so I will see how it develops.

29alcottacre
Oct 14, 2021, 12:26 pm

I finished Unstoppable: Siggi B. Wilzig's Astonishing Journey this morning. I wish the writing had been better - I felt like it was lackluster in comparison to the story itself. I would still recommend the book though (guardedly) as the story is excellent. Siggi Wilzig survived Auschwitz, came to America with $240 in his pocket, and became a multimillionaire. In the meantime, he also strove to ensure the survival of his people, the Jews. His children and grandchildren have also taken up this mission.

30annushka
Oct 14, 2021, 9:46 pm

I read The Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz for this challenge. The author did an impressive job researching and writing a story about Witold Pilecki who became a prisoner at Auschwitz as part of his underground work to liberate Poland from the Nazis at first and later from the Communists. It was heartbreaking to read about the reports from Auschwitz reaching London and Washington and being completely ignored.

31alcottacre
Oct 15, 2021, 12:24 am

>30 annushka: I will have to look for a copy of that one. Thanks for the recommendation, annushka!

32benitastrnad
Oct 15, 2021, 2:26 pm

Stolen and forged art is a crime that continues to fascinate me. For that reason I picked this subject for my Heroes and Villain's reading for this month.

I just finished reading Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby by Candida Moss and Joel Baden. This is a book length expose of the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby, and their activates that include the Museum of the Bible. The authors of the book had written a magazine length articles about the Green family illegally acquiring antiquities looted from the Iraq National Museum and then failing to declare some of them to U. S. Customs, and lying about the contents of the shipping boxes on other stolen cuneiform tables when they were imported to the U. S. These articles were published in The Atlantic and The Economist and were specifically about the stolen and smuggled antiquities that came from the Iraq National Museum. This book goes into more detail (sometimes lengthy detail) about what was stolen, but nothing about how the items were purchased or where, so this is not a True Crime kind of book. It is very academic as the authors are both professors and the book is published by Princeton University Press.

The authors also go into detail about the Green family financing their Scholars Initiative. This is a program in which the Green family recruited professors who were NOT experts in their fields, but who were newer academics trying to make a name and a place for themselves in academe. The Green's would pay them and their students to translate hundreds of papyri and thousands of cuneiform tablets, but these professors and students could not publish anything about their work for the Green's. Anybody who knows anything about academe would know that this is not the way the system works. Academe is about the free exchange of knowledge, so the idea of nondisclosure contracts should have been red flags to professors at any level.

The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D. C. also comes under scrutiny with equally disastrous results. This is a museum built specifically as a way to spread the gospel and - oh-by-the-way, it is a very successful tax shelter.

In the end some kind of justice was meted out as the Green family has had to pay a $3 million dollar fine and return thousands of artifacts to Iraq and to Egypt. The Museum of the Bible did open in 2017, but already then it was opening under a cloud as this book and the magazine articles, as well as discussion of the Green family's activities in academic circles had taken place. The Green family was rapidly acquiring a reputation and the discrediting that goes along with that.

I had heard about the scandal and wanted to know more about it, so I picked this title to read for the villain's part of this challenge. Our library had a copy of it and so I read it. It is short - 190 pages, but hefty in its talking points. There are only four chapters in the book, but each chapter deals with one aspect of the problems in the Green family's methods of collection and dissemination of information. The authors are very thorough in their analysis and lay out the evidence that the failings in the enterprise are the result of a one-world view that is centered on white protestant evangelical basis that is set to confirm that basis. The authors point out the dangers of exclusion that are the result. While doing so they also point out the great educational dangers in letting these infractions slide. The harshest criticism of the Green's is reserved for their willingness to purchase stolen artifacts with a total disregard for laws that protect these artifacts and have made it very difficult for trade in these to be imported. The principles of provenance were totally disregarded by the Green family and their unwillingness to own up to the purchase of stolen artifacts and the reasons why this is so important to the study of these materials as well as for the people who live in the countries that were looted is also discussed at length.

I have now started reading Thieves of Baghdad by Matthew Bogdanos. He is the Marine colonel who investigated the looting of the Iraq National Museum and tracked down many of the stolen artifacts that were sold to the Green family.

33benitastrnad
Oct 19, 2021, 12:29 pm

Thieves of Baghdad has been a real surprise. I find it strangely compelling for a book written by a jerk with overly high testosterone levels. That said, the story of how and why he was assigned to be the investigator at the Iraq National Museum is very interesting.

34benitastrnad
Oct 24, 2021, 12:19 am

I am about 2/3's done with Thieves of Baghdad and even though I have my problems with Bogdanos (not a man I would likely to like very much in real life) I get his passion and appreciation for all things antique. I am beginning to read the part where he is putting the pieces of the looting together and coming up with rich buyers who essentially commissioned the theft of certain items from the museum. I am also learning much about the corruption of third world countries and it makes me think I should have read Thieves of State. There would be another set of villains for this challenge.

35Familyhistorian
Oct 24, 2021, 10:28 pm

Richard III is a controversial figure, was he a villain or hero? It depends on which histories you chose to believe. The Last Days of Richard III and the fate of his DNA looked at the last five months of Richard’s reign detailing the events that led up to his final battle. It also looked at the after math and critiqued some of the accounts of Richards reign that were written over the years, most of them biased accounts which other writers have used as their sources. The book then recounted the finding of Richard’s body and the task undertaken to identify his remains. It was fascinating.

36benitastrnad
Modifié : Oct 30, 2021, 11:37 pm

I finished reading Thieves of Baghdad by Matthew Bogdanos over the weekend. I had started reading it because I thought it would be mostly about the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad and I wanted to learn more about the looting of the museum back in 2003. This book was NOT that kind of book. It was a memoir of the life of Bogdanos. As such it was a whole lot of braggadocio and less about what I was looking for. Even so I found the book interesting and compelling as Bogdanos is a very curious mixture of testosterone overload, learned classics scholar, and lawyer - not a polymath but close. I am glad I read this book as I do have a much better understanding of what exactly happened at the Iraq museum and why it happened. My conclusion is that there is nothing to be done about looting as it is a old as civilization, but that the root cause of this incident was greed and corruption at the highest levels previous to the war itself. Most of the oldest works on display in the museum were already replicas in 2003 because the real item had been stolen years before 1993 or 2003. All of the people who worked at the Iraq museum before 2003 should have been fired and told not to come back to work because they were part and parcel with the scam to skim these works and use them as a cash reservoir from which the high government officials could draw at will. The museum employees were no help in finding the looted items and in several cases didn't have the knowledge they needed to run a museum of that size and scope anyway. They had received their appointments as favors and reciprocity agreements with those in power in the government. Add to that the problem that the real looting had been done in the 30 years that Saddam Hussein was in power, and was probably done with his knowledge and consent by his sons and other party apparatchiks years before the actual First Gulf War, let alone the second. The end result is that the most valuable pieces that are gone are probably gone for good. They had disappeared into the black hole of rich collectors and will only reappear sometime in the future when that person or their heirs needs cash, or simply doesn't care about the pieces.

The most interesting part of the book is the last two chapters where Bogdanos discusses the problem of looting and what can be done about it. Who does it and why was also addressed. He fingers several groups of people for causing the problem. These are academe, art and history experts, international art dealers, and museum administrators - all are implicated in this whole mess. Most of these groups yammer on about provenance and then turn a blind eye to providing it. Bogdanos fingers the large international auction houses and art dealers as one source of this kind of problem. They simply make too much money from these transactions to stop doing it. They also do all they can to block legislation that would put road blocks up. Academe comes in for fire as well, because often the purchasers of the art call in academics to verify authenticity. The academics in turn get exclusive rights to study the object and write about it. This makes them unwilling to turn in art dealers or buyers when the academics have a reasonable suspicion that the object is stolen.

If you like memoirs, this was reasonably well written (by a collaborating author) and as a blow-by-blow account of the early days of the Second Gulf War it provides a decent picture of what the U. S. military was trying to do and what resources they had on hand. All-in-all, this was a book worth reading.

37Chatterbox
Oct 30, 2021, 11:04 pm

I've been reading a surprising and mixed group of books for this month's theme.

I'm finishing via audiobook something I hadn't even been aware of until I tripped over it on Scribd: Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History by Alex Von Tunzelmann. Fascinating in the context of the debate over pulling down statues -- did ancient Christians quibble about pulling down statues of "heretical" gods? What do we think about the idea of preserving statues of Hitler, of Stalin, of Pol Pot, of Leopold II of Belgium? Will we REALLY forget the history if the statue isn't there? Does the statue really have artistic value? (Is it Henry Moore, Michelangelo, Praxiteles?) Does the statue HAVE to be in a place where our ancestors a century or more ago placed it, because they idolized stuff that we now view as reprehensible, and that's why a statue was commissioned? (I'm thinking about Robert E. Lee -- he represents Jim Crow to black Americans, and when the statue was commissioned, represented the commitment of white Americans to racial discrimination...) People cheered when Iraqis pulled down that statue of Saddam (and probably even more Americans did so.) Statues are erected to memorialize heroes at the time they are commissioned, but we need to realize that as time passes, we view history in a different way and celebratory contexts simply are no longer appropriate. We change the names of towns (Kitchener-Waterloo in Canada used to be twin towns named in honor of German cities -- until World War I broke out.) People change their names. (Muhammed Ali?) So this is about heroes turned villains as history has evolved. It's fascinating, and looks at this from all kinds of perspectives -- not just the obsession with US Civil War era personalities, but Churchill and the British royals (colonialism) and communist heroes (Stalin and Lenin.) Why do statues go up? Why do people want them to come down? How do they become iconic? (think Pushkin writing about a famous tsarist equestrian statue...)

Also read Beyond the River by Ann Hagedorn, an excellent look at a group of key figures in the Underground Railroad on the Ohio/Kentucky border in the decades leading up to the civil war. It's a reminder that real heroes -- people willing to risk everything -- tend to be small in number. Ohio may have been a 'free' state, but that didn't mean its citizens liked the idea of formerly enslaved or free black men and women being treated as their equals. Nor did they like those radicals who were ahead of history during the era of Dred Scott and federal laws requiring everyone to help restoring 'human property' to 'owners'. We acclaim these people as heroes today, but at the time, their courage left them rather isolated. A similar theme emerged in reading Timothy Snyder's book about the Holocaust, Black Earth. He explicitly describes the 'rescuers' and their small numbers relative to those who were indifferent.

Finally, read The Irish Assassins by Julie Kavanagh about the Phoenix Park murders in late-Victorian era Dublin. The victims of extreme Irish republicans and a rather ham-handed but ultimately successful assassination plot were two high-ranking members of the Anglo-Irish rule, including a duke's son who had arrived to take up a post in the country the day before. The ideal of Irish independence may be 'heroic' but the people who commit this kind of violence in the name of that ideal is hard to describe as heroic. (Think of IRA bombers blowing up random people to get the British out of Northern Ireland/Ulster.... I have a hard time quarreling with the idea that Ireland is for all Irish -- including Protestants who can trace their roots there back four or five centuries. But to call bombers 'heroes', as hard-core republicans still do? Gah.)

So, this ended up being an interesting month for me, as it made me think a lot about who we see as heroic and why, the link between heroic behavior and a 'heroic' cause, and how all of those perceptions change with time. Napoleon was a hero to many -- but he abandoned armies in Egypt and later led them to utter disaster in Russia, in pursuit of some Messianic vision of his own destiny.

I could go on and on. Which is a sign of an interesting series of books.

I'll post the November challenge tomorrow...

38Jackie_K
Oct 31, 2021, 6:56 am

>37 Chatterbox: That statues book sounds good. We've had a lot of those discussions this side of the Pond too recently - eg re the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue in Oxford University, and the pushing of the statue of a slave trader, Edward Colston, into the harbour in Bristol.

39alcottacre
Oct 31, 2021, 6:59 am

>35 Familyhistorian: I am going to have to look for that one, Meg. I have been fascinated by Richard III ever since I read Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time as a teenager.

40benitastrnad
Modifié : Oct 31, 2021, 12:25 pm

I think we all had adventures in reading this month with our respective heroes and villain's. This was a good category and one that made me think about who is a hero and who is a villian. I really like this Challenge (or whatever it is). It has certainly made me up my game in reading nonfiction. Those fancy new graphs that LT is providing showed that to me in a very graphic way. Prior to joining this group only about a quarter of my reading was nonfiction. In the last two years that has gone up to a third and I am constantly looking for nonfiction that fits into these categories. As a result I have expanded my horizons considerably.

41m.belljackson
Oct 31, 2021, 12:39 pm

Super Hero and Villain in one book = Toussiant Louverture, The slave who freed Haiti,
was kidnapped and left to die by Napoleon Bonaparte.

42Chatterbox
Oct 31, 2021, 8:48 pm

>38 Jackie_K: Both of those statue disputes are covered in the book! The Colston statue's fate made me LOL, I confess. That said -- the best part of the book were the introduction and epilogue, where the author raises some fascinating and provocative perspectives about how statues overlap with public art, with history, etc.

43Chatterbox
Oct 31, 2021, 8:48 pm

I've been without power all day and will post the new challenge tomorrow. Apologies..

44Chatterbox
Nov 1, 2021, 2:01 pm