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Read any good books lately?

Mediancat

Mediancat

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Anyone read any good history books recently? I'm about to read one on the sinking of the Andrea Doria, and have a biography of Jennie Jerome Chuchill waiting in the wings.

Rob
 
I've been in a bit of a pause for history with library closures, but one I own that I'd been going through recently is Crawford Young's The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. I think it'd be considered comparative politics rather than history, but I consider Young's books historical as well as political.

Young was a brilliant scholar, likely the world-leading academic on African politics until he died earlier this year. One of the few authors of non-fiction whose output I own the majority of. His writing and research is impeccable.
 
Two excellent biographies, for U.S. History:

John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights by David S. Reynolds. Learn about this very influential man, but also get a look at the ante-bellum U.S. It surprised me how many in both North and South compared their America to the England at time of its Civil War. Northerners were Puritans, and John Brown was often compared to Oliver Cromwell. Southerners were Cavaliers. John Brown was a tremendous person, comparable to Joan of Arc, or even (according to W.R. Emerson and others) Jesus Christ. Without John Brown's inspiring martyrdom, the North would have eventually acquiesced to the Confederate Secession.

Citizen Hearst: A Biography of William Randolph Hearst, by W.A. Swanberg. This is a fun read about another influential American, with many insights into the America of his era. The movie Citizen Kane was not an exaggeration — just the opposite! The true stories of Hearst are almost unbelievable.
 
Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Larson
Had I Known: Collected Essays by Ehrenreich
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Moore
 
I also read Radium Girls and was shocked, appalled, and educated at the same time. I recently read a biography ogf Brown, but I dunno if that's the one.

haven't gotten to the biography of Jennie Churchill yet, but the book on the Andrea Doria was educational. Am now reading a biography of Howard Hughes.

Rob
 
Stagg vs. Yost: The birth of cutthroat football. A fascinating look at the early, truly vicious days of college football, when things were more violent, more corrupt amd far more open about it than they were even a generation later.

Rob
 
The Light that Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes is worth reading. It's interesting take on success of populists in Poland and Hungary and quite good info on Putin policy.
 
Am now reading rick Perlstein's Reaganland. I thoroughly enjoyed his previous works, which is a history of modern conservative starting with Goldwater's run in 1964. Perlstein's books aren't hard to read, but they're dense with information and ideas.

Rob
 
Reading The Reckoning by Prit Buttar, about the collapse and defeat of Army Group South in the Ukraine and Romania in 1944. Fascinating reading of military history. I didn’t realize that numerous other Armies were encircled after Stalingrad but at least Hitler allowed them to break out. Still was rough on German troops though. Hard to fight your way backwards.
 
Making a point of reading about countries not my own at this point: I have two books dealing with the history of Ireland, and a biography of Simon Bolivar.

Rob
 
Read any good books lately?
Click to expand...
Would interesting books do?

DEAR READER, The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il by Michael Malice I found interesting and informative. Malice visited North Korea and collected the materials that are used for teaching history in the schools in NK... so essentially what North Koreans believe about the world, their country, and about Kim Jong Il. It reveled a rather odd (sometimes fanciful or even magical) alternate reality North Koreans live in.

One example:
The Titanic sinking was a sign to the world from the heavens that the "Dear Leader" (Kim Jong Il) had been born.

I wouldn't necessarily call it a good book but it was definitely an interesting book.
 
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Because I became re-interested in the Shakespeare Authorship Question I read Looney's Shakespeare Identified and followed that up with Mark Anderson's Shakespeare by Another Name. Both made the case for the 17th Earl of Oxford being the primary composer of the Shakespeare Canon. Very interesting reading.
 
If "World History" includes Prehistory, I have three books to recommend:

(1) Memory Code by Lynne Kelly. (There are different editions of this work. The earlier one I read was less expensive than the Amazon price I see for this one.) Kelly's controversial idea — that preliterate societies were dependent on mnemonic devices — has changed the views of many top anthropologists. The memory device could be a portable board, still found in primitive African and Australian societies as in this photo:
lukasa-writing.jpg
... or much larger, like the monoliths and pavilions for music at Stonehenge.

(2) Europe Between the Oceans (9000 BC to 1000 AD) by Barry Cunliffe. A good look at Europe's pre-history (although when he wrote the book, Cunliffe lacked modern understanding of the very important Indo-European expansion).

(3) Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings by Jean Manco. This will fill in some of the picture Cunliffe misses, but will appeal most only to those interested in details of DNA evidence.
 
We Survived (compiled by Eric H. Boehm) was published in 1949 and reissued in 2003. It collects the stories of 14 survivors of Nazi persecution. Boehm was a press officer with the occupation government, and in that position he sought out survivors with stories to tell. I have read the first three narratives, and they are riveting. The first chapter is the story of a Jewish lady who was given shelter by a courageous young woman who had only a small apartment to share with her, which put both of them in extreme peril. (They were in Berlin, and when the air raids began in earnest, their situation quickly got desperate.) The second chapter is by a man who joined a Communist youth group in the mid-30s and quickly drew the attention of the Gestapo. In April 1945, as the Reich was collapsing, he was ordered into a column of men who were designated to be shot by the SS... The third narrative concerns an art student who was assigned to the Luftwaffe's painters' unit -- he was to produce stirring propaganda art showing Germany's brave pilots. But he loathed the Nazis, and began to cultivate friendships with others who shared his views. Before long, he was denounced by men who had heard him spreading defeatist views.
Well worth reading. I'm about 80 pages in (of 300+) and I think I'll finish it tomorrow.
 
Finished Tim Pat Coogan's biography of Michael Collins -- I have his book on The Twelve Apostles (The Irish freedom fighters) on order. Never read too much about modern Irish history and felt it was a gap I needed to fill.

Am currently reading Young and Damned and Fair -- an excellent biography of Catherine Howard, the second "beheaded" in the list of Henry VIII's poor wives. The author does a good job of making it clear she wasn't particularly anyone's pawn, and wasn't promiscuous by any definition of the word, but she still seems to have been in well over her head as Henry's wife, and not been overly wise, either.

Rob
 
The thread title asks for books we've read "lately", but I'm here to recommend a book I read decades ago. I expect scathing reviews as soon as I mention the author's name, so please read the whole post before pounding on the Reply botton! And anyway, further discussion of this book definitely requires its own thread.

I recommend The Sign and the Seal by Graham Hancock. It will present an interesting new perspective on the earliest history of the Jewish religion, the Knights Templar, Ethiopia and more.

Graham Hancock's career can be broken into three distinct phases:
  • He was an accomplished writer of non-fiction. He worked as correspondent for The Economist and several newspapers. His books included Ethiopia: The Challenge of Hunger.
  • He became obsessed with the Ethiopian legend that the Ark of the Covenant is housed today in Axum, Ethiopia. Yes, that Ark of the Covenant, allegedly containing the stone tablets on which the Finger of Yahweh had inscribed the Ten Commandments. Between 1989 and 1995 Hancock published only one book: The Sign and the Seal, a report on his investigations into the Ark of the Covenant. As an indication of this obsession, he notes on the dedication page that his (first) marriage did not survive the writing of the book.
  • The Sign and the Seal became a major bestseller. Perhaps in part because he had found a path to wealth, he then authored or co-authored a number of books about lost civilizations and so on, widely derided as pseudo-science or conspiracy-theory crackpottery. Let us NOT discuss those books.
I think that The Sign and the Seal should be judged on its own merits. Even if we stipulate that his later books were crackpottery, it doesn't follow that everything in this book is wrong. And there is much of interest in the book.

Even if you decide that EVERY hypothesis Hancock presents is false, and that his accounts of history are distorted, the book is still an interesting read! He presents a very personal narrative, e.g. about his trip through a war-zone to reach the city of Axum. And if the elaborate patterns he weaves together to support his wild hypotheses are indeed fabricated, you may still admire his handicraft at weaving these patterns!

One simple fact assures me that "scholars" have not given this book fair attention. Two on-line reviewers state that the book supports the Ethiopian myth that the Ark was brought to Ethiopia in the time of King Solomon by followers of Menelik, Solomon's son by the Queen of Sheba. In fact Hancock specifically rejects that myth; much of the book is taken up with reasons that myth is wrong, and a very different proposal is developed with much detail and much evidence. Yet reviewers get this completely wrong! Clearly they've made no effort to even skim the book, yet are happy to pontificate about it.

Example: there was a Jewish temple on Elephantine Island near present-day Aswan. This was a rather recent discovery and should be of great interest to Jewish scholars, yet it seems almost ignored — an unsettling mystery they'd rather not think about? Yet the Elephantine temple meshes perfectly with the hypothesis Hancock constructs.

Discussion of the  Qemant people and Beta Israel intrigued me and made me interested in the earliest history of the Hebrew people. There is much more of interest in Hancock's book, even if you reject his constructions as overly fanciful.
 
In the Sewers of Lvov: A Heroic Story of Survival from the Holocaust (1990) by Robert Marshall
Horrifying but often inspiring account of Jews who escaped the Lvov ghetto as the Germans set about executing all the remaining inhabitants. They'd prepared a tunnel into the Lvov sewers. A desperate mob of refugees followed the original group, but within a few weeks, only a core group remained, and by the end of their ordeal, some 14 months later, the group numbered about 12. They survived because a Polish sewer worker took up their cause and made daily trips down to their hiding place, with whatever food he could find for them. One of the survivors gave birth in their refuge, which led to an excruciating scene.
This true story was filmed as In Darkness in 2011.
 
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I have been neglecting my book reading over the past few years, but I finally finished "Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari.


I really enjoyed the book and learned some things I had never knew much about or had considered before. After finishing it, I've decided that humans would have been better off if we had remained as hunter gatherers, instead of fucking up the planet and so many of the other species on it.
 
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