Book cover of The Footnote: A Curious History

Book description

The weapon of pedants, the scourge of undergraduates, the bete noire of the "new" liberated scholar: the lowly footnote, long the refuge of the minor and the marginal, emerges in this book as a singular resource, with a surprising history that says volumes about the evolution of modern scholarship. In…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Footnote as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Grafton shows how something we often take for granted as part of scholarly history writing – the footnote – itself has a history. There is no historian today who is better at making the history of erudition accessible and engaging to general readers, and The Footnote is a case in point. Wittily and elegantly written, Grafton’s book turns what might seem to be an esoteric topic – the story of how footnotes came to be a sine qua non of historical scholarship – into the story of how historians dealt with their uncertainties about the foundations for historical knowledge and…

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Book cover of December on 5C4

December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…

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In late April 1865, almost 2,000 newly freed Union prisoners of war are packed onto the steamer Sultana, in poor repair and with a listed capacity of 376 passengers. Among them are four Indiana soldiers…

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