Historical Book Recomendation Thread

Louis XXIV said:
Yeah, it's important to understand when it was written. And to understand Latin, yeah, definitely understand Latin (OK, maybe not, but I seem to recall a passage in Latin that he just writes without bothering to translate it as if everyone speaks Latin).
Click to expand...

You don't read Latin? Just another casual I guess.

GIT ON MY LEVEL BRO
Spoiler :
:p
 
Another beauty:

Prester Jon and Gog and Magog aroused hopes and fears quite as measureless as those opened up by the prospects of an atomic age.
Click to expand...
 
Two more books on Grant and Washington:

‘Sherman’s Ghosts,’ by Matthew Carr

By JAMES M. McPHERSON

MARCH 25, 2015

This thought-provoking and at times frustrating volume is really three books rather awkwardly spliced together. The first part, roughly half of “Sherman’s Ghosts,” analyzes Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s destructive marches through Georgia and the Carolinas in the last months of the American Civil War. The next part discusses the supposed impact of Sherman’s actions on subsequent wars through Vietnam. In the final section, the ghosts of Sherman largely disappear as the journalist Matthew Carr leads us through a maze of conflicts from the ouster of Manuel Noriega in Panama to the continuing blood baths in the Middle East and drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Click to expand...

Full review: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/b...=edit_bk_20150327&nl=books&nlid=61820453&_r=0

And

‘Washington’s Revolution,’ by Robert Middlekauff

By RICHARD BROOKHISER

MARCH 27, 2015

Robert Middlekauff, the distinguished historian of colonial and early America, has already written about the American Revolution in his 1982 book “The Glorious Cause,” the first volume of the Oxford History of the United States. Now he turns to the war’s most famous figure. George Washington was commander in chief of the American Army for almost the whole of the war (1775-83). He served at a time when there was no executive branch of government, only a one-house Congress to guide him. He had direct command of the war’s central theater, from coastal New England to Philadelphia, and he was in at the death at Yorktown.
Click to expand...

In full: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/books/review/washingtons-revolution-by-robert-middlekauff.html
 
Ajidica said:
[books on the First and Second Congo War]

I haven't read it, but I've heard good things about Jason Stearn's Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. From what I can tell from the reviews, he is a bit more focused on what happened inside the Congo and personal experiences, while Prunier tries to put the conflict in context of Africa's post-independence history and takes a more international view.
http://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Glory...d_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=1KHJDPGKJM6VZV8CGME1
Click to expand...
Update.
I finally got around to reading this book and while it is probably the most readable of all the books on the list, I had several issues with it.
Firstly, the author places a heavy emphasis on interviews he has conducted. While this makes the book quite fascinating and offers an interesting insight as to what people thought, the result is that the book feels poorly cited. (A situation not helped by his preference for endnotes over footnotes.) The author rarely presents the interviews word-for-word, instead turning them into a 'story'. Unfortunately, those stories don't have any citations beyond the authors own interviews which due to his 'story-fication' of them, blurs what the interviewees recollection is and what comes from the author.

Secondly, because the author focused on personal experiences he really struggled with integrating the political/economic rationale for why other countries got involved. This sort of lends the book and his narrative a sense of "Oh Dearism" (to borrow the phrase from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUSsEqOXYbw) as the impression you get is of people engaging in senseless acts of violence and greed because of some sort of omnipresent malevolent entity. Prunier did a far better job of handling this by covering the political and economic motivations. Additionally, because Stearns was focused on the Congo itself, he paid very little time to the international actions going on - notably the dogged attempts by South Africa to finally bring about a diplomatic resolution.

In summation, while Dancing in the Glory of Monsters isn't a bad book by any stretch and is quite readable, it suffers slightly in that it is too long to provide a nice overview of what happened (along the lines of Martin Meredith) yet isn't detailed enough for a scholarly book (like Prunier).
 
New book on the fall of the Ottoman empire:

‘The Fall of the Ottomans,’ by Eugene Rogan

By BRUCE CLARK

APRIL 16, 2015

In November 1914, the world’s only great Muslim empire was drawn into a life-or-death struggle against three historically Christian powers — Britain, France and Russia. All parties made frantic calculations about the likely intertwining of religion and strategy. The playing out, and surprise overturning, of these calculations informs every page of Eugene Rogan’s intricately worked but very readable account of the Ottoman theocracy’s demise.

As Rogan explains in “The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East,” the Christian nations of the Triple Entente had millions of Muslim subjects, who might in their view be open to seduction by the Ottoman sultan, especially if he seemed to be prevailing in the war. The Ottomans, for their part, were in alliance with two other European Christian powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. Paradoxically, the Teutons urged the sultan to use his role as caliph and proclaim an Islamic holy war. One factor was that, as a newcomer to the imperial game, Germany had relatively few Muslim subjects and less to lose if the card of jihad were played. The Ottomans, meanwhile, feared the influence of foes, especially Russia, over their own Christian subjects — including the Greeks and Armenians, who formed a substantial and economically important minority in both the empire’s capital and the Anatolian heartland.
Click to expand...

More here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/b...l?emc=edit_bk_20150417&nl=books&nlid=61820453

As well as one on a perhaps less known Armenian reaction to the genocide committed during that fall:

‘Operation Nemesis,’ by Eric Bogosian

By JOSEPH KANON

APRIL 16, 2015

On March 15, 1921, a 25-year-old Armenian in Berlin, Soghomon Tehlirian, shot and killed Mehmet Talat Pasha, who had been the Ottoman minister of the interior during World War I. After the Ottomans’ collapse, Talat had fled into secret exile and was now plotting a return to power with the other Young Turks (or, formally, the Committee for Union and Progress) who had led Turkey into its disastrous wartime alliance with Germany. To Tehlirian, however, Talat was something infinitely worse than simply one of the leaders of a defeated empire. He was a member of the central committee, with a key role in authorizing the Armenian genocide, the series of deportations and massacres in 1915-16 that under the fog of war had murdered much of Tehlirian’s family and some one and a half million other Armenians.

In the sensational trial that followed the assassination, Tehlirian, apparently a lonely misfit seeking to avenge his mother’s death (he said he had seen her beheaded), played David to Talat’s Goliath. And as the world (and the German jury) learned more about the horrors of the period, Tehlirian began to seem not so much a murderer (though he freely admitted killing Talat) as an agent for justice. Talat, after all, had been tried in absentia for war crimes and sentenced to death. Tehlirian was avenging not just his family but an entire people. After a stunning verdict to acquit was reached, The New York Times ran a headline that read “They Simply Had to Let Him Go.”
Click to expand...

Continued here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/b...l?emc=edit_bk_20150417&nl=books&nlid=61820453
 
So to allow Agent327 to find the thread that he was the last to post in for over seven months, I recently picked up The Templars by Piers Paul Read and The Norman Conquest by Marc Morris.
 
I wasn't looking for a necro thread. But thanks a bunch. So for 7 months nobody read an interesting history book. That's really, really sad...(Perhaps someone should arrange a merger or something?)
 
I started posting most of my history book reviews over in the OT thread because it was more visible and I got more discussion going. If you search for my name in the "what are you reading" thread, most of my posts there contain talk on history books.
 
Any good place to start for a history of French Algeria?
 
Terxpahseyton said:
Hello everyone!

I am looking for books telling me about ordinary (work) life in any pre-industrial time and place. I want to get a hang for the realities of life back in the day.

Thank you
Click to expand...

That encompasses literally thousands upon thousands upon thousands of books. You're going to have to be a bit more specific.

Realities were different for different sexes in different social groups at different times in different places. One book won't give you a "hang".
 
Terxpahseyton said:
Hello everyone!

I am looking for books telling me about ordinary (work) life in any pre-industrial time and place. I want to get a hang for the realities of life back in the day.

Thank you
Click to expand...

I can throw you two for the Roman Empire: Mary Beard's Pompeii (obviously focused mostly on the site in question, but uses it along with writings and archaeology from elsewhere to build up a general picture of what Roman city life was like) and Robert Knapp's Invisible Romans, which takes a much wider view across time and geography. The strength of each is the weakness of the other, so it would be interesting to read them in tandem and see what you think.
 
Owen Glyndwr said:
That encompasses literally thousands upon thousands upon thousands of books. You're going to have to be a bit more specific.

Realities were different for different sexes in different social groups at different times in different places. One book won't give you a "hang".
Click to expand...
Naturally. Just recommend what you thought was good.
AnthonyBoscia said:
Fernand Braudel's Structures of Everyday Life covers food, dress, housing, local markets and other exciting stuff from the Late Middle Ages right up to the 19th century. It's like playing Europa Universalis with a magnifying glass.
Click to expand...
That sounds really good. Thanks!
Flying Pig said:
I can throw you two for the Roman Empire: Mary Beard's Pompeii (obviously focused mostly on the site in question, but uses it along with writings and archaeology from elsewhere to build up a general picture of what Roman city life was like) and Robert Knapp's Invisible Romans, which takes a much wider view across time and geography. The strength of each is the weakness of the other, so it would be interesting to read them in tandem and see what you think.
Click to expand...
Also great. Thank you!
 
Never did find a book covering the military and political aspects of the whole of French Algerian history.

Would anyone happen to know of any good introductions to the Warring States Period in China?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

T
Under the Comanche Moon (dev thread)
3 4 5
Replies
90
Views
3K
Prof. Garfield
P
Gori the Grey
Jon Stewart and the Ruination of American Comedy
2 3 4
Replies
77
Views
3K
Hygro
Hygro
Z
historical mod
Replies
8
Views
2K
Dracosolon
D
Ajidica
  • Locked
What Book Are You Reading XV - The Pile Keeps Growing!
49 50 51
Replies
1K
Views
46K
Kyriakos
Kyriakos
The_J
Plough.com - Interview with Christoper Tin - The Tapestry of Sound
Replies
0
Views
645
The_J
The_J
Top Bottom