Rainy Day Reads

Challenges:  Diversity Bingo 2017: Displaced Main Character Everyone has raved about this book since it came out and once again I am disappointed. The premise was interesting but it just didn’t work for me.  We follow two half-sisters, however they don’t know they are sisters and they never actually meet in the story. Each chapter tells the story of one of their descendants, so we only get to know each characters for quite a short while in their lives.  At the beginning of the story set in 18th century Ghana one of the sisters is married to a wealthy Englishman, a commander at the fort, while the other sister is taken and sold as a slave in America. As mentioned we follow their descendants through time and see how life pans out for them right up until present day.  As for the challenge there were certainly a number of displaced characters. The sister sold as a slave is of course forcibly removed from her homeland, but a number of the othe...

This is a non-fiction book about the Americas before Columbus came along. There are a number of new insights in this book, at least new to me, and I found it all very fascinating. A few of the things I had heard about before, like the fact that even before the first European settlers arrived in North America disease had swept the continent and fundamentally changed Indian society. So the “original” way of life in North America that the settlers experienced was actually an adaptation to new circumstances.   Aside from this, the book covers a number of topics more or less thoroughly, including maize, disease, the Mayan calendar and the Five Nations. There are accounts of both North, South and Mesoamerica before and after contact with Europeans in here and that was my only complaint, and a minor one at that. The book did jump around a little in time and place and that made it feel a little disjointed. But with such a massive scope it is hardly possible to do otherwise....