Category: dewey decimal project
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Dewey Decimal Project 998 S South!
At long last, I’ve come to the end of the project, a bit more than seven years since I started. 999 in the Dewey Decimal system is “Extraterrestrial Worlds” but at my library, the end was in Antarctica instead. The last book, it turns out, has an incorrect call number labeled on its spine and…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 980 GAL Vol. 1 Memory of Fire: Genesis
I’m drawing to a close on this project and for the 980s—South America—I saw this book which one of the back cover blurbs describes as “taking vital parts out of everything that has been written on the discovery and settlement of America … arranging them in a kind of verbal collage … something that defies…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 973 ZIN A people’s history of the United States
For the last two decades, I’ve heard many people waxing rhapsodic about Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, so when I got to the 970s—History of North America—I decided that this was my chance to finally read it. What I found was not the life-changing book that many people consider it to be.…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 960.3 WES Divide and rule: the partition of Africa, 1880–1914
The 960s bring me to Africa. Another part of the world that I know very little of the history of. The selection of options was somewhat uninspiring, and I decided to take a look at this book. I knew very little about colonialism in Africa. I was most familiar with the history of colonialism in…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 954 DAN A brief history of India
At some point in the late ’90s I decided that I wanted to read a history of India. I think it might have been a result of reading the themed issue of Granta on the country. Whatever my motivation, it never went beyond putting “some history of India” on the long list of books that I…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 940.5318 LEB Memories, miracles & meaning: insights of a Holocaust survivor
The 940s are the history of Europe and I decided to pick up something that might be useful for the novel. One of the things that I’ve learned in the course of researching the novel is that women’s accounts of the Holocaust have been largely marginalized. There is an explicitly stated claim that to treat…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 933 JOS Flavius Josephus: selections from his works
The 930s are the history of the ancient world (not surprisingly, ith the majority of the numbers reserved for the ancient world that was under the rule of the Greeks and Romans). Looking over the options, I spotted this collection of the works of Josephus. Josephus is best-known as being one of the earliest non-Biblical attestations…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 920.72 DIN Alone! Alone! Lives of Some Outsider Women
The 920s are biography. My library, like any others, shelves most biographies separately, alphabetically by author (this is one of the things that I like about the Library of Congress system—there, literature, for example, is shelved by country/language and grouped by era and biographies and critical work are shelved alongside the authors’ work. Similarly, biographies of…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 910.45 DUN Pirate women : the princesses, prostitutes, and privateers who ruled the Seven Seas
Looking for a different change of pace, for the 910s—Geography and Travel—I decided to give this book about women pirates a look. Of course, as Duncombe is quick to acknowledge, there is little information about her subject available. In some cases the “pirate” women (Duncombe is a bit expansive in her definition of pirate) may…