@Cutlass:
I wish Herwig's The Marne: 1914 were already out so I could have read it and recommend it on those grounds, because it's recent scholarship by an author I respect on a topic that should be reasonably interesting, but it's not out and I haven't read it so I can't recommend it in good conscience. It will be in less than a week though.
Mmmm if he enjoyed 1491 he'd probably like Wickham's Inheritance of Rome, about the period between the fall of Western Rome and the year 1000 (ish) in the Mediterranean basin, or Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire, which is a bit further back and much more focused.
Since he seems to have been reading a fair bit of military history, an episode you might interest him in is the German unification. Michael Howard's Franco-Prussian War (in its more recent editions) is mostly from the French point of view and quite good, one of the first "new military history" books which has a narrative that still stands up very well. Wawro's Franco-Prussian War and Austro-Prussian War are newer but not written from the PoV of the losers and in fact are pretty critical of them (almost unwarrantedly IMO). Showalter's Wars of German Unification is both recent and even-handed (and excellent) but suffers terribly from a deficiency of maps, plus has kinda dense prose (with excellent footnotes) and may be difficult to acquire. So out of the bunch I'd probably go with Howard out of those.
I'd say "avoid Diamond".
Why'd you want to make the point that he's an "indifferent student"?
I wish Herwig's The Marne: 1914 were already out so I could have read it and recommend it on those grounds, because it's recent scholarship by an author I respect on a topic that should be reasonably interesting, but it's not out and I haven't read it so I can't recommend it in good conscience. It will be in less than a week though.
Mmmm if he enjoyed 1491 he'd probably like Wickham's Inheritance of Rome, about the period between the fall of Western Rome and the year 1000 (ish) in the Mediterranean basin, or Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire, which is a bit further back and much more focused.
Since he seems to have been reading a fair bit of military history, an episode you might interest him in is the German unification. Michael Howard's Franco-Prussian War (in its more recent editions) is mostly from the French point of view and quite good, one of the first "new military history" books which has a narrative that still stands up very well. Wawro's Franco-Prussian War and Austro-Prussian War are newer but not written from the PoV of the losers and in fact are pretty critical of them (almost unwarrantedly IMO). Showalter's Wars of German Unification is both recent and even-handed (and excellent) but suffers terribly from a deficiency of maps, plus has kinda dense prose (with excellent footnotes) and may be difficult to acquire. So out of the bunch I'd probably go with Howard out of those.
I'd say "avoid Diamond".
Why'd you want to make the point that he's an "indifferent student"?
