FLIGHT

Incredibly funny and insightful take on history. Sarah Vowell, who contributes to NPR's This American Life and was the voice of Violet in The Incredibles, makes a geeky pilgrimage to the sites relevant to the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Her writing is extremely engaging and humorous without being stupid, and she makes a lot of great observations about politics and history without being pedantic or dry. She has an incredible knack for finding connections in history.

Among other things, you'll find out the Oneida dishware company's connection to a Biblical sex cult and why Lincoln's oldest son is referred to as 'Jinxy McDeath.'

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I love her work on "This American Life." Thanks for the recommendation.

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www.israelsanchez.com

http://israelsanchez.blogspot.com/

This book is awesome, I actually listen to the audio book (in small doses!). It had great guest readers like brad bird and jon stewart.

Also if you want more down-to-earth history reading, I recommend 1776. I only just started it but I'm gobbling it up, it's really wonderfully written!

Haven't read either of these, but as long as we're discussing history books with dates as the title, I recommend 1421, all about the Chinese fleet under Admiral Zhenghe that pretty much "discovered" most of the world. Some of the conclusions it draws are a little far-fetched (like the Chinese circumnavigating Greenland or planting colonies in the middle of the Amazon), but if even half of it's true, Western history needs to be completely rewritten. Turns out Columbus wasn't an incompetent navigator after all. He knew exactly where he was going (thanks to Chinese maps), and just lied about his true destination to everyone back home.

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Jonathon Dalton