Amundsen. Shackleton. Peary. Nansen. The pantheon of Arctic exploration is full of legends, but one you probably never heard of who belongs there is Valerian Albanov. Although a big fan of Arctic exploration books, I had never heard of Albanov…
Category: History
With God in Russia, by Walter J. Ciszek, SJ, with Daniel L. Flaherty, SJ. In 1939, an American Jesuit priest named Walter J. Ciszek (born in 1904) slipped into the Soviet Union using a false identity, in the hope of…
The Shallows, What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr, originally published in 2010, with an updated afterword (2020). “Of all the sacrifices we make when we devote ourselves to the Internet as our universal medium, the…
After writing my short review of an 18-year-old ER episode I couldn’t forget, I started thinking about books I’ve read over the years that similarly stuck in my mind. I came up with 33 of them. This is by no…
Leo Tolstoy’s non-fiction book The Kingdom of God Is Within You is a forceful argument for non-violent resistance — and against organized religion, governments, and the entirety of pagan civilization under which we have lived for thousands of years. Throw Christianity and…