You Know You're In Ann Arbor When...

On Saturday arriving for the Ron White show we headed to a nice Korean BBQ restaurant, Tomukun, which was fabulous to say the least. It had a 45 minute wait, but we were early so that was fine.

So we wandered around and across the road was a used bookstore, which emitted an irresistible siren's call.

Lovely place, full to the ceiling with books.

You knew you were in Ann Arbor when you passed this section by:

Yep, forget about just a political theory section, in Ann Arbor you need one section designated for Marxism and one for Anarchism. It's not called "The People's Republic of Ann Arbor" for no reason.

Perusing around the shelves I found the following books of interest:

Into the Jaws of Death: British Military Blunders 1879-1900

That one is Mr. Garibaldi's fault. After his excellent article on British military blunders in the Boer War, this one just leapt off the shelf into my hand. It should be a good read.

Then in the classical studies section this bargain popped into view. For $7.50 I could not say no:

Josephus: The Historian and His Society

One of the great ancient historians, Titus Flavius Josephus was a Jewish leader captured by the Romans in the First Jewish Revolt who found favor with the Emperors Vespasian and Titus (hence his Roman appellation) and became a noted historian of the time. His work on the Jewish War is an excellent recounting fo the war by someone who was there and his other works siuch as The Antiquities of The Jews, a history of the Jewish people up to the Jewish Revolt is similarly very well done.

Josephus is certainly an interesting fellow and this book on his life and way as an historiographer should make for good reading.

Interestingly enough, the section in the Antiquities of The Jews dealing with Jesus, while some references exist in all texts, the section that claims to recount his crucifixion and resurrection, the Testimonium Flavianum, was most likely added in the fourth century AD, and 3 references to Jesus were added long after the events in the 9th Century in Russia by a Slavonic monk.

Yes, the Russians were inserting false news into the mainstream long before Twitter and Facebook.