January Magazine – now in blog form

Some of you will have received the January Magazine newsletter for some time. These days I got the last instalment, informing me that now January Magazine has become a blog. Well, what a pleasant surprise. What I can recommend it for are its numerous interviews with various authors, among them Margaret Atwood, J. K. Rowling and Salman Rushdie.

In addition, January Magazine now and then draws the reader’s attention to books that he would have missed otherwise – like today’s featured book A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz (excerpt). Reading the excerpt made me curious. It’s a reporter’s book about what Americans (and other people) don’t know of America’s early history. No, Columbus did not drop off a couple of pilgrims at Plymouth Rock and sail home again …

Plymouth, it turned out, wasn’t even the first English colony in New England. That distinction belonged to Fort St. George, in Popham, Maine — a place I’d never heard of. Nor were Pilgrims the first to settle Massachusetts. In 1602, a band of English built a fort on the island of Cuttyhunk. They came, not for religious freedom, but to get rich from digging sassafras, a commodity prized in Europe as a cure for the clap.

Not only did I look up sassafras, but I also found out about what sounds like the activity needed to produce applause (the clap).

And after all, there is even a complete web site for this interesting book: www.voyagelongandstrange.com – containing a video clip where the author talks about his motivation to choose this historical topic, an audio clip with an excerpt from the book and some additional material: explorers map and photo gallery – try the history quiz if you like getting frustrated ;-)