The Best to Worst Books I Read in 2003

Discover the best to worst books I read in 2003—honest rankings and reviews of that year's reads. Find your next favorite or skip the duds!

Black Death Cover
Book

Black Death

by Philip Ziegler

Examines the origins of the Black Death and its spread across Europe in the 14th century. Also discusses its social and economic consequences and effects on the church.
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ID: 0590438492
(Type: books)
The Great War and Modern Memory Cover
Book

The Great War and Modern Memory

by Paul Fussell

The year 2000 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Great War and Modern Memory, winner of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and recently named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books. Fussell's landmark study of WWI remains as original and gripping today as ever before: a literate, literary, and illuminating account of the Great War, the one that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world. Exploring the work of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen, Fussell supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for those writers who most effectively memorialized WWI as an historical experience with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning. For this special edition, the author has prepared a new afterword and a suggested further reading list. As this classic work draws upon several disciplines--among them literary studies, military history, cultural criticism, and historical inquiry--it will continue to appeal to students, scholars, and general readers of various backgrounds.
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ID: 0135666465
(Type: books)
Mummies, Myth and Magic in Ancient Egypt Cover
Book

Mummies, Myth and Magic in Ancient Egypt

by Christine El Mahdy

How the practice of mummification arose, how it was perfected and how it came to play a central part in the ancient Egyptian quest for eternal life.
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ID: 0786013621
(Type: books)
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ID: 0340769432
(Type: books)
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ID: 0671672657
(Type: books)
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ID: 0385238770
(Type: books)
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ID: 014005667X
(Type: books)
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ID: 0786411015
(Type: books)
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ID: 023106490X
(Type: books)
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ID: 0440223334
(Type: books)
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ID: 1932270108
(Type: books)
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ID: 0671023888
(Type: books)
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ID: 0316279722
(Type: books)
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ID: 0340654015
(Type: books)
In the Wake of the Plague Cover
Book

In the Wake of the Plague

by Norman F. Cantor

The Black Death was the fourteenth century's equivalent of a nuclear war. It wiped out one-third of Europe's population, takingmillion lives. And yet, most of what we know about it is wrong. The details of the Plague etched in the minds of terrified schoolchildren -- the hideous black welts, the high fever, and the awful end by respiratory failure -- are more or less accurate. But what the Plague really was and how it made history remain shrouded in a haze of myths. Now, Norman Cantor, the premier historian of the Middle Ages, draws together the most recent scientific discoveries and groundbreaking historical research to pierce the mist and tell the story of the Black Death as a gripping, intimate narrative.