Surviving the Holocaust: The Tales of Survivors and Victims; by Ryan Jenkins.

There is a phrase about judging the book by its cover, and it comes to mind as one is growing perplexed as one reads this book. For the cover shows a couple of very adorable toddlers with the six point star pinned or sewed onto their clothes, looking uncomprehendingly at the camera as normal children do, and the title is "Surviving the Holocaust: The Tales of Survivors and Victims" - so naturally one is led to expect a book telling real stories about those that survived, intimate details and tales as recalled by survivors, and the two kids on the cover in particular.

Instead, this is a very concise, very succinct documentation of the history of the Holocaust and its salient details, beginning with the German surrender and the attitudes at the time, and going into just how and where and when did the executions take place, with a few witnesses that were allowed to live so they were able to tell about it, despite Nazi efforts to the contrary, to cover up the whole massacre of millions. The numbers alone are staggering.

One of the effects of reading this is a surprising realisation about how one forgets one's own deep anger at those that wronged one, however just the anger - not because one subscribes to the doctrine of forgiving all crime and forgetting the victims, but because this horrendous account of what was done to humans by other humans makes one wish to distance oneself from any such emotion that would bring one into the realm of doing anything cruel to anyone even specifically known to be guilty, however they deserve it unlike the victims of Holocaust.

This is not to say one becomes pacifist saint forgiving all crimes and propagating such doctrines, opposing capital punishment for rapists and murderers and so forth, but that one wishes to distance oneself from any emotion that could bring one into the same realm as the sadists who perpetrated the Holocaust, generally and specifically. One could not, would not, belong to the same world as those that did the killings at Babi Yar or Auschwitz or any of the other dozens of places where Nazis exterminated humans - Jews, Roma, communists and other disseters, and more - in such horrible way, and felt superior. One simply could not, would not share in such horrors, not as perpetrators, not as one who even holds such an emotion!

And so it is a must read.

The Vikings; by Robert Wernick.

Perhaps more is known now about Vikings and the exploration of new lands via northern routes, than generally allowed to be assumed publicly, especially in US - children are still taught about discovery of the continent by Columbus as the first person to do so, which is incorrect not only due to the presence of humans on the continent - (which Columbus did not in fact step on, being at one of the islands of Caribbean, and returning therefrom after making his sailors swear they had in fact discovered India, which is the root of the US still referring to indigenous as Indian, knowing fully well that such name is a lie - those people had nothing to do with India) - but also because in fact Nordic Europeans, specifically ones referred to as Vikings, had in fact known about the lands across the ocean, and even had not only stepped on the mainland but lived there for many centuries before dying or giving up and returning, due to the lack then of mass migration.

As one person pointed out (wish one could recall precisely who and where, for reference), the fishing fleets of northern Europe were always venturing further out in the Arctic latitudes in search of more fish, and kept knowledge of lands across ocean to themselves for reasons of keeping their fishing waters from competition and overcrowding.

But the word was bound to be whispered about within the community, and so some were bound to land across ocean in the various new lands - Iceland, Greenland, and the main continent, which acquired its present name after the sailor Amerigo Vespucci only post a voyage after Columbus. The Vikings in fact ventured as far south as Watertown, MA, and traded from posts on the Charles river, as told via the Vikings tower at Waltham on the Charles river.

Wernick goes succinctly but quite thoroughly into history of Vikings as known, describing their society, their ventures into Europe and raids across various nations, conquests and establishing societies in various parts from Ireland, UK, Normandy and Rhineland to southern regions of the Baltic and more, before he describes their ventures across the ocean, which he does not as an amorphous group but with specific names of the people - collected from Vikings' own sagas.

Even apart from the information factor, this work makes for a delightful reading, due to various details of lives of Vikings and also of the new lands, or for that matter the European ones they ventured into. That it wasn't only lack of migration then, which there was little reason for not happening, but the more insurmountable difficulty of a Little Ice Age making the Viking colonies in Greenland difficult to sustain, what with the deep cold making agriculture impossible, and survival difficult.

Also mentioned is another factor - Eskimo migration from regions of Pacific coast across northern Canada to Greenland, and their being far more acclimatised to the cold and better at surviving in the land. Thus the Vikings were pushed out of Greenland completely, but survived in Iceland, albeit with numbers of Scottish and Irish migrants they had taken there as slaves but got integrated instead with, gradually, into a society that merged into one without slavery.

A lesser known fact - lesser for those not professionally historians is about Danelaw; and an amusing one is about how Vikings were defeated in Ireland despite victories in wars!