Lucas Blogs About Books

Hmm, morning doesn't have idea lighting conditions for my crummy webcam bookselfies. So, what's this book's deal? Well, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present  is a book by Oxford archaeologist Chris Gosden. As you may have guessed from the title, it examines the place of magic in societies around the world from the earliest evidence of magical practices by early humans up to the present day. Unfortunately, part of the deal with this book is that I didn't finish it . Lucas! I know, I know. This was one of those books that I just couldn't get into back when I was in my "it seems like all I can finish is comic books" funk. On the one hand, that means I have plenty of comics that I can blog about. On the other hand, I feel a weird compulsion to blog about books I didn't finish and why I didn't finish them. Unlike say, Bloody Rose  I didn't stop reading this book because I hated it. The subject matter is legit...

I took the dust jacket off while reading this one in the break room at work. What in the world possessed me to read a book about Josef Mengele, the Nazi scientist known as "the Angel of Death" for his horrific experiments on children at Auschwitz? Well, I was initially drawn to it because the author, David G. Marwell, is a historian who worked with the Justice Department to help track down Mengele (or rather, his remains) in the 1980s, and I felt a morbid curiosity about how exactly Mengele managed to evade capture for nearly forty-four years. Also, I remember I was annoyed with the role he played in Amazon's The Man in the High Castle adaptation, where he's depicted as one of the scientists testing out a machine to travel between worlds. I mean, seriously, Mengele had doctorates in medicine and anthropology. He didn't have the background in theoretical physics that would be necessary to build a portal. That said, he definitely would be interested in performing ex...