Musings of a Snickerdoodle

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson is one of the most interesting history books I've read in a long while.   Lots of history   books have interesting facts and can keep your interest simply because of the elements of history they present, but this one is among the 'time machine' history books that pull you into the time period and make you seem as if you are a present but invisible observer of the events of the past.      I really didn't know much about the Lusitania before I read this book, I think that I remember hearing it(or reading it) mentioned in connection with World War I but I didn't really have much of a concept of what happened.   The Lusitania was a British passenger ship headed for England, torpedoed by Germany in the "Great War" before America had joined the fight. Larson tells the story from the point of view of many of the passengers, Winston Churchill and the secret "Room 40" in Britain, and also...

Ulrich Zwingli, by William Boekestein is, as the series is titled, a "Bitesize Biography" but there is a good amount of content in that 'bite'.   Despite this biography's size, it gives a lot of information to Zwingli. It actually seems to 'introduce' you to him as opposed to making you a mere acquaintance of his life.   The things I most remember about Zwingli, from other books and sources on him, are that he died in a not-so justifiable battle/war and that he debated and opposed Luther on the presence of Christ in the 'Lord's Table'.   I've found out that there were several things I didn't know about his life, these things include sanctifying works of God in and through his life such as his doing away with preaching on Bible texts assigned by the Catholic Church, and opting for a verse by verse, book by book method of preaching instead. On the negative side, there were the manifestations of the sinful 'remnants' of...