What are you reading?

It's been a long time since I've made a book post either here or in the Tavern thread, but I'm currently engrossed with The Great Influenza by John Barry. It's an amazing book about the Spanish flu and the medical research to find a cure.

I also just got a copy of To Crown the Waves, edited by O'Hara, which examines the navies of the First World War. I enjoyed the WW2 version of the book, so I'm looking forward to reading this one.
 
I just finished The New New Journalism and former OSU Walk-On Mark Titus' HYSTERICAL Don't put me in coach, my thrilling journey from the end of the bench to the end of the bench

Thinking of grabbing Saints and Sinners next. I'm headed on vacation next week and will have lots of reading time...
 
Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds. On a bit of a Reynolds kick, just finished Pushing Ice, which was awesome.
 
I've been reading Bernard Knight's Crowner John series, most recently The Awful Secret.
 
Just received The Second World War by Beevor. Clavell just lost priority.
 
Reading Deaf Sentence by David Lodge. First book I've been made to read for uni that isn't a drag.
Clavell just lost priority.
You equine weakling. You should've started out with King Rat.
 
"'Shut Up, I'm Talking' And other Diplomacy Lessons I learned in the Israeli Government'" by Gregory Levey is one of the funniest books I've read in some time (keep in mind I probably read more humor oriented stuff than anything else combined).

The fact that the book is his true account makes it even more funny.
 
"Collapse" by Jared Diamond. Jared has his critics, but it's still an enjoyable read and he makes numerous astute points. Any civ player should be interested in this!

"Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy, a brutal tale of US history in the 1800's.
 
Probably half of the forum (and likely all of WH) has read or is familiar with Jared Diamond's arguments. I'll quote what I said in the other forum about his work, I still think it's a pretty good post for some asinine reason:

I always figured part of the over-the-top Jared Diamond hate was the result of the over-the-top praise he received elsewhere--if everyone else didn't fawn over the book, we'd be a lot more measured in the criticism of it. There's the scholar's criticism of properly identifying what is conjectural and what is fact, citing appropriate references, using primary sources over secondaries, engaging and critically examining competing theories, etc. that tends to be buried in popular reviews of the book. That really rankles the folks here, and with good reason. But maybe that thread of criticism on how interdisciplinary works containing science, history, etc. are presented to the public and how the popular media reviews them is unfairly concentrated and channeled against Diamond. It's not entirely his fault, he's just the poster boy, prominent example #1 of a bigger problem that is not entirely his making.

That all being said, I have read both of them and thought the prose was engaging. Indeed, I'm embarrassed to admit the first book recommendation I made on this forum was for GGS back in 2007 or thereabouts. :blush: In my defense, I was only a serious history reader for about a year at that point, before then it was all sci-fi, swords, and sorcery.
 
Probably half of the forum (and likely all of WH) has read or is familiar with Jared Diamond's arguments. I'll quote what I said in the other forum about his work, I still think it's a pretty good post for some asinine reason:

Sounds like I ned to read the one Diamond e-book I got: Guns, Germs and Steel I recently read Louis Fischer's Men and Politics so acerbic over-confidence is not a problem for me in any way.

I also read Galleano's Open Veins of Latin America which is the Latin American perspective on the European dominance of South America. Chilling, but well-written as Galleano, even in translated form, is a wonderful writer.

Read it!
 
Robert Doughty - Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the First World War

Something of a reread, but I wasn't doing a particularly close reading the first time around so it feels relatively fresh. Good so far. I wish there were more on the prewar stuff and on war plans, but the author is understandably more concerned with what actually ended up happening during the conflict so whatever.
Sounds like I ned to read the one Diamond e-book I got: Guns, Germs and Steel I recently read Louis Fischer's Men and Politics so acerbic over-confidence is not a problem for me in any way.
Factual inaccuracy and theses unsupported by evidence don't seem to be much of a problem for you, either. So, full steam ahead! ;)
 
Still working my way through A Clash of Kings, one day I'll finish it! And the other three books as well!
 
Sounds like I ned to read the one Diamond e-book I got: Guns, Germs and Steel I recently read Louis Fischer's Men and Politics so acerbic over-confidence is not a problem for me in any way.

I also read Galleano's Open Veins of Latin America which is the Latin American perspective on the European dominance of South America. Chilling, but well-written as Galleano, even in translated form, is a wonderful writer.

Read it!

It's on the Amazon wishlist I'm using to keep track of my desired reading. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your POV, that list is very, very long.

I should also note my post wasn't meant to endorse or recommend Jared Diamond, but rather to articulate why our WH crew hates him so.
 
Robert Doughty - Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the First World War
Factual inaccuracy and theses unsupported by evidence don't seem to be much of a problem for you, either. So, full steam ahead! ;)

You wound, me, punk Dachs... I may seem slef-righteous by bourgeoisies standards, I suppose, since that is the perspective from which MOST of history's perspective is written, but watch and learn....

Do tell me how Pyrrhic Victory is, as Guns of August was awesome... Facts SUPPORTED by evidence, btw.

Men and Politics does not claim to be a documentary -- it's the meanderings of an ego-centric journalist -- and full of interesting stories, first-hand, as the events "between the wars" were occurring, so historically speaking, it's really primary source material -- which is always biased. So, once I got over Fischer's ego, it confirmed my postulation that since the great world war of 1937 - 1945, the balance of power has shifted -- world conditions favor socialism...

However, I do recommend Galleano's Open Veins... plenty of evidence to conclude, quite obviously, how capitalism works for those who make it, and how it fails miserably for those who don't...
 
Ohhh, now you've done it. Dachs has a few history pet peeves, and one of them is the Schlieffen Plan. :D
 
Guns of August was awesome... Facts SUPPORTED by evidence, btw.

Yeah, "facts".

And I'm not going to be an asshat about this because I was there about 2-3ish years ago. The Guns of August, while being an excellently written piece of history (as all of Tuchman's books are), it is not really a book you should be citing as a history of the First World War. To start with it is over 40 years old. That's a major red flag, especially on histories of the First World War, where anything written before the fall of the Berlin Wall (and subsequent freeing of Imperial Russian and German records to Western study) is highly suspect and an incomplete picture to be sure. Second the book is written by a nonacademic. While that isn't automatically a strike against a writer, it means they aren't necessarily engaged in the same sort of academic dialogues, rigor, and scrutiny that an academic at a university would undergo.

The sources Tuchman uses are very dated and very biased. Her opinions on the so-called Schlieffen plan largely come from Liddel-Hart, who himself was quoting from post-WWI accounts by German officers (notably the German railmaster [his name escapes me at the moment]) who were mostly trying to absolve themselves of blame for the disastrous events of WWI, particularly its opening months and the seeming unforced bungling of the Marne. Because Helmuth von Moltke the Younger was dead, he made for a very easy scapegoat for these officers, and it was relatively easy to bring up Schlieffen (a well-regarded Chief of the General Staff) and his plan as a counterpoint.

In addition Tuchman is a deep Anglophile and even deeper Germanophobe. She lets this affect her characterization of German plans and operations, falling slightly into a modified Sonderweg (From what I remember, although Dachs is free to tell me I'm completely wrong on this) argument, characterizing the German military staff as warlike, hawkish, and brutally efficient. She never really looks into the serious problems facing the British government at the time, and how those problems affected British international policy. The way she characterizes things you get the sense that Foch and French basically had total control of French and British war planning.

The big problem is that she totally overstates the influence Wilhelm had in German policymaking. This ties in with her Germanophobia. She characterizes Wilhelm as a baby-idiot-savant unsure of what he actually wants, and essentially blames the whole war on him. In reality Wilhelm really didn't have a lot of control on German government or policymaking. He had control of appointments, and his influence in the German Admiralty was certainly substantial, but to call him an absolute monarch (which is essentially how Tuchman characterizes him) is ludicrous. She also does this with King Albert I of Belgium on the opposite end of the spectrum (from the way she describes him you'd think he fought off the German advances all by himself).

Finally there's the obvious Elephant in the room: she completely ignores: The North Sea, the colonies, the Eastern Front, The Ottoman Empire, and pretty much everything except for the Marne campaign.

If you want a truly good basic overview of the first 1.5-2 years of the war, the classic is Huw Strachan's The First World War, part I: To Arms!. It really is the gold standard as far as a comprehensive history of the First World War goes. Also I would recommend Dachs' history article on the historiography of the Schlieffen Plan for a more thorough explanation of what it is, why it's mischaracterized, and how scholarship on it has dramatically changed in the last 25 years or so.
 
That's a major red flag, especially on histories of the First World War, where anything written before the fall of the Berlin Wall (and subsequent freeing of Imperial Russian and German records to Western study) is highly suspect and an incomplete picture to be sure.
Are you ready to go through all that again next year?

Currently Reading The Troubles by Tim Pat Coogan.
 
@Owen: Tuchman was only chronicling the first month of the war, not the entire war. The Tannenberg battle is featured, among other things, so the Eastern Front is touched on, as is the backwardness of the Tsarist Army, and the "keep 5 million men on the battlefield at all times" strategy.
Besides, I don't cite anything as a definitive "history," since all history is written from bias. You cannot "objectively" write about anything, especially if you were there, and more importantly if all of your sources are first-hand, as you are dealing with their bias. Historians collect facts, make inferences, present analysis.

Frankly, for me, anything written after the Berlin wall falling is also subject to the most rigorous scrutiny of all: out of work academics who made a career off of "Sovietology," who now have no USSR to criticize. They "studied" while millions in the "West" (USA, Mexico particularly) saw their incomes decline, their ability to even go to college decline and an entire industry built on the Cold War had to re-tool their propaganda machine and find some other "Bugimen" to scare their children with.

Case in Point: Adam Ulam, mouthpiece of the Hoover Institute, wrote one of the most definitive (and biased against the USSR and Communsm) histories of the Bolshevik Revolution, from the Decembrist origins on to Lenin's death. He had unprecedented access to files and data provided by the USSR, alternative sources, etc, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was an SOB, and a class enemy, but he still wrote a fairly decent history...

I read Tuchman's book because it also reaffirms my view of history -- of the social, political and economic forces that lead to the most ruinous conflict of our age. However, as things go, the War was one of the great locomotives of history and it brought us the Bolshevik Revolution.

I am not a historian. I study history to change it...
 
@Owen: Tuchman was only chronicling the first month of the war, not the entire war. The Tannenberg battle is featured, among other things, so the Eastern Front is touched on, as is the backwardness of the Tsarist Army, and the "keep 5 million men on the battlefield at all times" strategy.

Neither of these points is true though. To characterize the Russian Imperial Army as "backwards", while maybe holding water in, say, 1906 or 1908, certainly was not the case by 1914. The Russian Army had undergone a number of important military reforms in the years after the Manchurian War; by 1914 its quality was a match for any modern Western Power.

As to size, considering the mobilization policies of France and Germany (especially the latter), Russia's actual military size was smaller on a relative level (in proportion to overall population).

As to "touching" on the Eastern Front: the big thing about World War I was that it was a World War. No front existed in isolation. If you want to talk about the western front, then you're going to have to talk about: fight on the North Sea between the High Seas Fleet and the Grand Fleet (which impacted British policymaking in regards to the BEF). You're going to have to talk about Austria-Hungary as they factored heavily into Germany's larger Continental strategy. You're going to have to talk about the Ottoman Empire for basically the same reason. You're going to have to talk about Serbia because Austria-Hungary's inability to deal with Serbia in a timely manner certainly impacted the Western Front. Focusing exclusively on the tactical aspects of the Western Front narrows Tuchman's perceptions of the war and leads to a less valid analysis.

Besides, I don't cite anything as a definitive "history," since all history is written from bias. You cannot "objectively" write about anything, especially if you were there, and more importantly if all of your sources are first-hand, as you are dealing with their bias. Historians collect facts, make inferences, present analysis.

No history is objective. This is the point of history. It's not about being objective, and the worst history is that which tries to be so. History is about analysis - taking all the available data and documentation, and trying to extract meaning from the events. It's not about telling you what happened during WWI, but why it mattered, what the ramifications were. Tuchman's analysis is necessarily narrowed because she's writing with less information than later writers.

This is where Historiography comes into play. Historiography is the study of how history is studied - it looks at the development of the dialogue among academic historians on a subject and how that dialogue changes over time. What you have to realize is that historical bias does not happen in isolation, and it's not something that is actively pursued. It's not like a Marxist Historian or a Postmodern Historian writes history in the way they do because they're actively trying to be biased. They just have different approaches to history, different groundings, and different perceptions of time and "good". Historiography changes contextually over the course of decades due to dialogue and academic review. One guy puts out a book saying something. Another writes a book or review challenging it. Then the other guy refines his argument, or a third guy synthesizes the two books into something new. Or a fourth guy comes to the table with new evidence or research and the whole field gets upended and begins again. Newer is generally better in the world of history because older books have had time to be debunked for various flaws. Valid points the older book has will have been synthesized, consolidated or refined in newer ones. There is little reason to read older books (outside of historiographical research) because newer ones have superceded them; this is especially true with more modern history, where, as I said before, the fall of the Berlin Wall has given historians more and better materials to work with. Tuchman's book is flawed because she was more or less only working with the English (and some French) accounts of the war. German and Russian accounts of the war effectively did not exist at this time (in a usable form for Western Historians).

I mean we're only just now managing to reconcile the drastically conflicting German, French, and British accounts of the war in Togoland and Kamerun.

Frankly, for me, anything written after the Berlin wall falling is also subject to the most rigorous scrutiny of all: out of work academics who made a career off of "Sovietology," who now have no USSR to criticize. They "studied" while millions in the "West" (USA, Mexico particularly) saw their incomes decline, their ability to even go to college decline and an entire industry built on the Cold War had to re-tool their propaganda machine and find some other "Bugimen" to scare their children with.

Case in Point: Adam Ulam, mouthpiece of the Hoover Institute, wrote one of the most definitive (and biased against the USSR and Communsm) histories of the Bolshevik Revolution, from the Decembrist origins on to Lenin's death. He had unprecedented access to files and data provided by the USSR, alternative sources, etc, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was an SOB, and a class enemy, but he still wrote a fairly decent history...

Right. Yeah, what?

I read Tuchman's book because it also reaffirms my view of history -- of the social, political and economic forces that lead to the most ruinous conflict of our age. However, as things go, the War was one of the great locomotives of history and it brought us the Bolshevik Revolution.

But her views of history are not valid. That's the thing. Her understanding of the war and her views of history as presented in the book are fundamentally flawed. How can you profess to be an agent of change and good for the world when you refuse to keep yourself informed and up to date on the academic discourse going on about the subject?

That's rather like being a contractor but refusing to stay up to date on changes to building-code in the city or region you operate in because it doesn't reaffirm your views on how a building should be constructed.
 
@Owen: I am a building trades professional. I am up to date on building codes. Your analogy is flawed. Building codes are a sum product of labour, manufacturers, fire departments, insurance companies and contractors and are based on a confluence of factors -- they are concrete laws to be followed -- no history lessons subject to interpretation.

I still use woodwork refinishing techniques the Chiense perfected 700 years ago -- and my wood finishes last a long time and take as little time as a factory finish. Latest is not always the best. The further we are from history, the more distorted it CAN become. All history, as you say, is subjective. However, being "up" on the latest spoon-feed discourse on WWI to me flies in the face of the data recorded closer to the era, by, again, first-hand documentation and accounts. But then, that's me.

The process of history, from Hegel to present, has not changed. I watch current events to see what they call it.

Incidentally, which of the things you mentioned happened in August 1914?

NB: How is someone's view of history flawed since all history is subjective?

You are wrong about the Russian army of 1914. It could not entrain and deploy as fast as the Germans or even the Austrian, and the Russian army had far fewer artillery pieces, especially in 1914. Russia was also borrowing money through Credit Lyon to pay for the war and they were broke. By 1917, there was one rifle for every three soldiers, and soldiers were often limited to 3 bullets a day! The Russians lost 9 million soldiers in that war -- but they did not even bother to count the civilians who ran short of food, or had diseases and starved as resources went to the front -- it was one of the things the Bolsheviks could agitate for: turn the imperialist war into a civil war; "Bread, Land and Piece."

'All for now, late for dinner.
 
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