I'm alive, if not kicking

Back from Spain Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, back at work 8 hours later, and in full crunch mode. There's no energy left over to do anything but work and catch up with recorded episodes of The Daily Show, 30 Days, The Office and reruns of The West Wing.

We finally managed to clear the list of shows tonight, and now I'm moving my attention to Google Reader with 170 unread items, and a brick biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. Having recently finished a biography of Thomas Jefferson: American Sphinx, by Joseph J. Ellis.



(The above widget may or may not work when I actually publish this post, and I have no idea how the RSS readers will pick up on it)

I liked it. I was watching the HBO miniseries on John Adams before reading this book, so I had "the other perspective" somewhat in mind when I took on Jefferson, but I'm not sure I would have had to. This is not a book written to put Jefferson on a pedestal, it's a book to explain why he thought what he thought. And what he thought. And, perhaps most importantly, how he thought.

As a sidenote, I watched Sarah Palin in an interview the other day, saying that she's "a federalist" because she believes that states should have more say. Thomas Jefferson cringes in his coffin.

I just cringed in my couch.

Anyway.

The reason I'm now onto Napoleon is because I've been "around" him in history for awhile now (with the American revolution, the French revolusion, the Lousiana Purchase, etc.) and now I can't really contain my curiousity about the man himself. That's how history lessons should be.

Too bad I hated it in high school.