Today’s suggested topic by the folks at Armchair BEA is Best of 2012. Here are five of my favorites, I tried to make some eclectic picks. Let me know if your read any and what you thought. I arranged them in alphabetical order. Flags Over the War­saw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the War­saw Ghetto Upris­ing by Moshe Arens More than any­thing, the book tells of the inabil­ity of humans to set aside ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences to fight a com­mon enemy. The book chron­i­cles how two groups of Jews were pre­vented by ide­ol­ogy to join and fight the Nazi mur­der machine Guest of Honor: Booker T. Wash­ing­ton, Theodore Roo­sevelt, and the White House Din­ner That Shocked a Nation by Deb­o­rah Davis This well researched book touches on pol­i­tics of the era as well as the frag­ile and dif­fi­cult race rela­tions after the Amer­i­can Civil War. The book exten­sively goes into the events that shaped the break­through meal, start­ing with the end of the Civil War and short biogra­phies of the two main play­ers. It was strik­ing to see how par­al­lel the lives of two men, each at one end of the social spec­trum (an ex slave and a priv­i­leged white) were eerily sim­i­lar. Both men, close at age, got…

Wel­come to another edi­tion of Tight­wad Tues­day. This week I figured we’ll try some humor – we all love to laugh, it makes us feel good and is good for the soul. Authors: If you’d like your book to be fea­tured on Tight­wad Tues­days please email me. For the Kindle: Daily Deal The File on H. By Ismail Kadare In the mid 1930s, two young Irish-American scholars voyage to the Albanian highlands with an early model of a marvelous invention, the tape recorder, in hand. Their mission? To discover how Homer could have composed works as brilliant and as long as the Iliadand the Odysseywithout ever writing them down. The answer, they think, can be found only in Albania, the last remaining natural habitat of the oral epic. But immediately on their arrival the scholars’ seemingly arcane research puts them at the center of ethnic strife in the Balkans. Mistaken for foreign spies, they are placed under the surveillance of a nearsighted informer with a prodigious gift for reproducing conversations he has overheard. He is soon generating a stream of floridly written reports about the visitors’ puzzling activities. News of their presence in the provincial town of N——- sets gossip…