October HistoryCAT - a country or region of your choice

Choose any country or region. It might be the country of your ancestors, the region where you spent a favourite vacation, the country where your friend lives, or a place you would like to visit. Your choice doesn’t necessarily mean the entire country but the history of a region. Or, use it as a catch-up for an earlier month. Your choice, fiction or non-fiction.

Some ideas:

A country

A city

Coastal regions, e.g. Maine, Nova Scotia, Cornwall, Mediterranean, Greek Islands, Australia

Lake District, England

Valley of the Kings, Egypt

Arctic regions

South Pacific

Mountain regions

A tagmash will help your search.

Tell us about your choice on this thread and don’t forget to update the Wiki here

Have fun!

A couple of potential titles immediately jump to mind although I haven't yet decided:

The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey - a historical mystery set in 1920s Bombay
In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez - historical fiction set in 1960s era Dominican Republic

>2 VivienneR: I really liked The Widows of Malabar Hill

I think that I will finally tackle The Radetzky March for this CAT. The setting is the Austrian Empire of Franz Joseph. I'm going to start as soon as I finish my current read. Thanks for this topic!

I am going to going to France and reading The Second Empress by Michelle Moran which is about Marie Louise, the Austrian Archduchess who became Napoleon's second wife.

I also have In the Time of Butterflies on my shelf so I might also be going to the Dominican Republic.

I'm not sure what country I'll want to focus on for this, but hopefully I'll have more time to figure this out on the weekend.

I'm thinking of The Novel of Ferrara by Giorgio Bassani, which is set in Italy before, during and after WWII. It includes The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, on which Vittorio deSica's 1970 film is based.

>3 Tess_W: I really liked The Radetsky March.

I think I may read The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean by Raoul McLaughlin for this one.

mmm. commenting so that I can find the thread again when inspiration strikes...

Leaning towards Russia and this book:

The Last Days of the Romanovs / Helen Rappaport

I'm planning on reading Women Surviving Apartheid's Prisons by Shanthini Naidoo in South Africa.

>2 VivienneR: >3 Tess_W: I'll be reading the sequel, The Satapur Moonstone.

>11 jeanned: Did not know there was a sequel! Off to find it!

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew H. Knoll

I found this on the new books shelf at the library and it instantly appealed so I decided to use it for this month's challenge as it deals with the entire planet that I'm choosing to call a "region".

Dealing mostly with geology, this is a surprisingly easy to read history of earth, well written in a straightforward style in chronological order, ending with how humans are changing the planet. Simple enough that I was able to comprehend, but I admit my knowledge of earth is still pretty elementary.

I completed The Radetsky March by Joseph Roth. A superb historical fiction about the Hapsburg Empire and the Trotta family's disintegration. (Austria)

I've posted the thread for November:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/335964

I went to France and found out in Louis XVII : la vérité that the boy who died in the Temple prison in 1795 really was descended from the Habsburgs.

For my book club I'm reading Chesapeake Requiem by Earl Swift. Although the subtitle is "A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island," Mr. Swift tells a lot of history of Tangier and surrounding islands which no longer exist or are greatly reduced in size.

The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg / Helen Rappaport
3.25 stars

This book really does focus on the last two weeks of the lives of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife and children (4 daughters and 1 son) as they were imprisoned and later murdered. It does back up in time, though, to detail how they got where they were.

There was a lot more politics in the book than I’d expected, so that was not as interesting to me as the parts that did focus on the family itself. I will say, though, that this seemed really well researched, with a lot of primary sources being used, most notably (I think) writings by the last head guard of the Romanovs in Ekaterinburg (Yakov Yurovsky), who was also one of the main murderers. This book may have included the most detailed description of the murders themselves, likely due to the writings of Yurovsky.

I read Cooper's Creek, a nonfiction book about the exploration of Australia.

Here is the link to the 2022 CAT poll. Please choose your favourite CATs, maximum 4.

https://www.easypolls.net/poll.html?p=617e26c6e4b04db784c1956a

Voting closes 4pm, Saturday, November 6th, Melbourne, Australia. That's 10 pm Friday in San Francisco.

Thanks to everyone who took part this month.

Just a bit behind. I've read A Visitor's Guide to Jane Austen's England by Sue Wilkes. It contains some interesting snippets, and quotes from contemporary diaries and letters, including Jane Austen's, but Wilkes can't come to terms with the eccentric spelling of the time, so every quotation is laden with sics. She's even put sic for some correct grammar of Jane Austen's!