Why am I passionate about this?
I’ve been fascinated by British colonial history for decades. Learning little about it as a child, I was shocked to learn, as a university student, how little I’d been taught about the British Empire at school. So, I set out to study it. Inevitably, this academic interest later combined with my fondness for country walking. I once trekked 1000 miles from the tip of Scotland–John O’Groats–to the southernmost part of England, called Land’s End. This took me 2 months. I’ve since explored the UK countryside’s colonial past in a humane history book called The Countryside, recounting my rambles through these lovely landscapes with ten walking companions.
Corinne's book list on the British Empire, by a UK historian
Why did Corinne love this book?
This book is a great guide to life in hard times. What struck me about it is that there is all sorts of wisdom in here that is less familiar to us than the most famous of Dr. King’s speeches. Here, you can see the old seeds of modern-day culture wars and some excellent and brave recommendations on how to deal with them.
The book could have been written yesterday, always a great test of enduring insight.
1 author picked A Gift of Love as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The classic collection of sixteen sermons preached and compiled by Dr. King
As Dr. King prepared for the Birmingham campaign in early 1963, he drafted the final sermons for Strength to Love, a volume of his best-known homilies. King had begun working on the sermons during a fortnight in jail in July 1962. Having been arrested for holding a prayer vigil outside Albany City Hall, King and Ralph Abernathy shared a jail cell for fifteen days that was, according to King, ‘‘dirty, filthy, and ill-equipped’’ and “the worse I have ever seen.” While behind bars, he spent uninterrupted time preparing…