Category: Books
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Weekly Wanderings: Nittany Lions Edition
▪ I spent last Tuesday and Wednesday visiting Penn State, where history professors David Atwill and Kate Merkel-Hess (a fellow UCI History graduate) had invited me to talk with their grad students about getting a PhD and then going into a non-academic career. I also gave a presentation on the Zhang Leping biography that I’ve…
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Weekly Wanderings: Failure and Success Edition
I’ve made the executive decision (because it’s my blog and therefore I’m the executive) to abandon the pretense that these “Weekly Wanderings” posts are always going to be published on Fridays, because the past month has shown me I can only manage that 50% of the time. So now my goal is to get them…
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Weekly Wanderings: Delayed October 7 Edition
Delayed because I spent the majority of last week moping around with the worst cold I can remember having in years (I’m mostly better now), and because the first item was supposed to be its own blog post but the damn thing just didn’t sound right and yesterday I finally had to admit that the…
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Bookshelf: The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright
Publishers like it when a book falls into a clearly defined category, especially if that category is a popular one that might rate a table display at a bookstore. A biography of George Washington, obviously, gets shelved with those of other Founding Fathers, and they are all, unquestionably, grouped under the larger heading of “American…
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Weekly Wanderings: September 30, 2016
▪ As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge Ghostbusters fan; were it not for the condo regulations in my development, I’d definitely have a 13-foot-high inflatable Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man on my front lawn for the next month. My brother assures me that my still furniture-free living room is large enough to accommodate him, but I…
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Weekly Wanderings: September 23 [er, 25], 2016
![Weekly Wanderings: September 23 [er, 25], 2016](https://mauracunningham.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/img_6179.jpg?w=1024)
With points deducted for lateness … ▪ I’m in Philadelphia for the weekend, here for a quick visit and a 90th birthday party for one of my grandmothers. I decided to fly on Spirit for the first time, which I know has a terrible reputation for customer service, but made this trip possible by selling…
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Weekly Wanderings: September 16, 2016
▪ There’s a crisp bite to the air in the mornings here now and the trees across from my house are beginning to acquire a rust-color tinge. This can only mean one thing: FALL IS COMING. Woot woot woot. I’m especially excited this year because Michigan is known for its apple cider mills, and there’s…
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Bookshelf: My Mini-Course on Detroit
When I decided to move to southeastern Michigan—a place I had never been before—I realized I needed to learn more about the region, especially its history. I live in Ann Arbor, but there aren’t too many books written about Ann Arbor (I checked). Detroit, on the other hand, has long been an object of authorial…
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Bookshelf: All the Single Ladies
By the time I finished reading the introduction to journalist Rebecca Traister’s new tour de force, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, I had highlighted so much that I started to wonder if highlighting was a meaningless activity. Every paragraph offered something I wanted to remember and return…
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Bookshelf — Knitlandia, by Clara Parkes
I read a lot of books about knitting, and a lot of books about travel, but I’ve never read a travel book about knitting before. There’s a reason for that, as Amazon tells me that this might be a genre with precisely one title in it: Knitlandia: A Knitter Sees the World, recently published by…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 