Journeys | Jody Ferguson Blog

In his book Priscilla, The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France the English novelist Nicholas Shakespeare...

Paul French, whose first book Midnight in Peking became a New York Times bestseller, explores a topic dear to me in his latest book...

Stephen Harrigan's novel Remember Ben Clayton is a beautiful tale of family, war, art and perseverance.

Imperial Twilight dissects the causes of the First Opium War between Great Britain and the Qing Dynasty in China in the 1840s.

Mark Obmascik relates a beautiful wartime tale in his book The Storm On Our Shores.

Fitzroy Maclean was an adventurer, a gentleman, a scholar, a diplomat, a warrior, and a hero.

His book, Forgotten Ally, is a history of China’s role in the war, which for China began in 1937, four years before Pearl Harbor.

In his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun J.G. Ballard tells us how he survived his adolescent years alone in an internment camp...

I recently re-read the novel The Wild Palms by William Faulkner, which he published in 1939.

In her book The Opium Wars British academic Julia Lovell describes both the historical and the contemporary Chinese distrust of the West...

The focus of Gwynne’s book is Quanah Parker, the last wartime Comanche chief, who ironically was the son of Cynthia Parker...

This friendship between Hemingway and Dos Passos is documented nicely in the book The Ambulance Drivers by James McGrath Morris.

The subtitle of the book tells you much more about the story Anderson is trying to relate to the reader: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly...

Before reading The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, I had vaguely heard of Epicurus...

The Israeli scholar Yuval Harari takes on the most basic, yet difficult subjects in his fascinating history Sapiens.

Mudbound takes on a variety of salient topics, utilizing a number of unique voices.

Stephen Kiernan’s book The Hummingbird tells the story of Deborah, a dedicated hospice nurse who is struggling...

For college football fans and history buffs, I highly recommend Terry Frei’s book Third Down and a War to Go.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a book set in the Mountain West and Canada in the first three decades of the 20th century.

It was with this in mind and to try to better understand the situation, that I took up William Dalrymple’s history Return of a King.