Similar Posts

  • Galilee Flowers

    February 25, 2001 When in 1543, the typhoon-blown Portuguese schooners approached the shores of Japan, the astonished sailors could not believe their eyes: on a warm spring day, the tropical island ahoy was buried under snow. They were witness to one of the real Seven Wonders of the World, the flowers of sakura, the wild…

  • Breaking the Spell

    4th edition, June 2017! In 1941, British Intelligence analysts cracked the German “Enigma” code. This undermined the German war effort – but also threw new light on day-by-day events in the Nazi concentration camp system. Between January 1942 and January 1943, encrypted radio communications between those camps and the Berlin headquarters were intercepted and decrypted….

  • In the Garden of Beasts

    By Erik Larson. Crown Publishing Group, New York, 2011, 448 pp. By June 1933, the “Nazis”—a new word in the world’s lexicon—had held power in Germany for almost six months, and were not expected to last, unlikely characters as virtually all of them were. The American ambassador to Germany had left his post shortly after…