UNESCO, some essays

I finished the biography of Florence Nightingale, and I found that her life was rather bland -- who knew she lived as an invalid for her last three decades? But it was well written and illuminating, if only to let me know the government made her a heroine to distract the population from its failures in managing the Crimean war. I also read a great novel, Walliulah's Tree without roots, about a Muslim medicine man. It was very revealing of the realities of poverty in the practice of Islam. I also read Clark's Dark Waters, an essay about the flood of Florence in 1996. For once, it was not an uplifting tale of heroism, but of the reality that much art was damaged by the flood, and damaged by well-meaning efforts to preserve it. I also read some basic texts for Korea: Virtuous Women is the collection of three well-known stories of queens, widows and secret wives in the Korean aristocracy of the Middle ages. I learned, among other things, that Chinese was the main language for centuries, as Latin was in the West. I also read Yashpal's historical novel, Amita, about a slave in the palaces of maharajah in India.