First, a few announcements. Housekeeping, if you will. I’ve been talking back and forth with not only my friends in the region, but readers who are Ukrainian. One of them said something yesterday that gave this helpless feeling I have a bit of a direction. You’re a writer, and an amazing one. Your words have power. Even in this email, your second paragraph is breathtaking. Use your gift for our cause. Until then, I’d been sort of mired in this “I want to do something but I don’t know what” slump. Other than opening my email and private message doors to literally anyone in the region who needs someone to talk to, I don’t really know what else I can do. Then, she sent that to me, and I realized she’s right. I do have a tool, and it’s right here. It’s this blog. It’s the history I’ve researched. It’s the people I’ve come to know and care deeply about. So, for a while, I’m going to be posting deep dives here that explore Ukrainian history, the thi...

Gilles de Rais: From Joan of Arc to Serial Killer

Folks, I've got COVID and it's really nailing me to the wall right now. I keep trying to be productive and get work done, but my mind is having a hell of a time staying focused. I've been, instead, been sort of listlessly engaging my brain bag in whatever way it is currently up to being engaged. So, me being me, I've been listening to this podcast about Jack the Ripper. Today, while I was listening to an episode, I went online and looked up victim photographs. There's one victim photograph of the fifth victim which has been colorized and slapped on a historical colorized photo subreddit. (You can see it if you click here , but be warned, it's extremely graphic and if you have a low threshold for nasty, maybe skip over it and stay with the black and white version you've probably already seen.) Anyway, it was in said subreddit where I saw someone say, "If you think Jack the Ripper was bad, look up Gilles de Rais" and I perked up because I've neve...

Review | Hitler and Stalin: The Tyrants and the Second World War - Laurence Rees

About the Book This compelling book on Hitler and Stalin - the culmination of thirty years' work - examines the two tyrants during the Second World War, when Germany and the Soviet Union fought the biggest and bloodiest war in history. Yet despite the fact they were bitter opponents, Laurence Rees shows that Hitler and Stalin were, to a large extent, different sides of the same coin. Hitler's charismatic leadership may contrast with Stalin's regimented rule by fear; and his intransigence later in the war may contrast with Stalin's change in behaviour in response to events. But at a macro level, both were prepared to create undreamt of suffering, destroy individual liberty and twist facts in order to build the Utopia they wanted, and while Hitler's creation of the Holocaust remains a singular crime, Rees shows why we must not forget that Stalin committed a series of atrocities at the same time. Using previously unpublished, startling eyewitness testimony from sold...

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