Nice to lie about enjoying fruitcake and chocolate and reading Fire Weather and A Christmas Carol and new cookbooks and all, while The Literary Review of Canada is busy publishing "In the Spotlight," my review of the 2023 Cundill History Prize finalists.
The books this year are Tania Branigan's Red Memory, about consequences of China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution;
Kate Cooper's Queens of a Fallen World, about the roots of Augustinian theology, sort of;
and James Morton Turner's Charged, which is both a history of batteries and a powerful exploration of what the low carbon energy revolution will work and what it will require.
