Brief reviews

With the Katrina excitement, I'm not motivated to write any long reviews, but here's what I've read lately.

John Julius Norwich's A History of Venice was all right. Venice was a commercial power with a stable political structure that lasted a thousand years. While the population of Venice benefited from that situation, it makes for boring history.

Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel about an intersexual character who changes from a woman to a man. The first part of the book, which discussed the protagonist's grandparents, was appealing, but the characters and the narrative become less interesting later on.

Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism was pretty good. She analyzes atheist/agnostic/deist thought, and the religious reaction to it, throughout American history. She discusses the secularist aspects of the fights regarding the Constitution, abolition, woman's suffrage, civil rights, and other areas.