In my younger days, I'm ashamed to admit that I had a pretty low opinion of history. I had arrogantly/childishly decided that it just wasn't a subject I cared about and I rationalized not paying attention in class and ignoring opportunities to learn when they were presented. Then, when I went to college, I majored in a subject without any history requirements and blundered on in my ignorance.
Eventually I grew an interest in politics, world events, and travel and found myself with questions that could be most effectively answered by a knowledge of history. It begun to dawn on my what I'd missed out on for all those years. I was in a bind.
So what does one do when confronted with their own glaring lack of knowledge about a prominent aspect of human culture? Read books of course! And I'd like your help in finding the good ones.
On the bookshelf already:
-American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J.Robert Oppenheimer
-Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe
-Chaos by James Gleick
-Einstein by Walter Issacson
-Alexander Hamilton and the Founding of a Nation
-Inside the Third Reich
-Science and Secrets of Early Medicine
I've read the first three on the list and would be happy to discuss them, but I'm far more interested in hearing about your favorites.
Seeing very little of Asia here, so I'll do what any Sinologist would and throw in my two cents (most of these are pretty general - I think that's the best place to start, personally, but regardless all of these books are very good and very in-depth): A History of Modern South Asia by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal is probably one of the better texts about the modern Indian subcontinent. India: A History by John Keay is very good too, though it is far too ambitious. I will give him credit though - the dude tries to sum up about four thousand years of Indian history and does a pretty good job of it. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins by Yiching Wu is a very different look at the Cultural Revolution - paints it as a much more nuanced, tragic occurrence as opposed to Macfarquhar or Pye and other old school historians who tend to portray it as a struggle amongst the political elites and nothing else. Osman's Dream by Caroline Finkel rambles on a little but it is one of the few well written, comprehensive histories of the Ottoman Empire from start to finish. Mao and the 20th Century is a great biography of Mao by Rebecca Karl - he had a pretty interesting early life and it goes into detail there, which is nice. The Search for Modern China and The Gate of Heavenly Peace by Jonathan Spence basically serve as the core books for any class I've ever taken on Chinese history (and I've taken quite a few). He shatters the myths of an uninventive or stagnant China that we take for granted in the West - he presents the country what it was and is, a robustly dynamic if a bit reactive empire. Japan in War and Peace and Embracing Defeat by John Dower are fantastic reads, namely because unlike 95% of all academics, Dower can actually write. Japan at War: An Oral History by the Cooks is interesting in that many of the interviewees are soldiers that fought on the Japanese side during WWII. It really shattered the image in my head of the Japanese forces as consisting of horrible people through and through. Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers by Ohnuki-Tierney and Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies by Samuel Yamashita accomplish similar things. I read these for my dissertation and I cried. A lot. Women in the Muslim World is a pretty fantastic compilation of essays from leading academics. I only read the essays relevant to the Ottoman Empire (that was my focus at the time) but it had a few pieces on modern Egypt and the Abbasids etc. Definitely worth a read if you're into gender history at all. Paul Bailey's Woman in 20th Century China is the Chinese history equivalent I'd say. Mao's China and the Cold War and China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation by Chen Jian are both great reads for anyone interested in East Asian geopolitics. The main conclusion is that Zhou Enlai was one hell of a charismatic badass.
I'm surprised I have not seen it mentioned yet, so I'll add Thomas Friedman's "Who Wrote The Bible?" to the list. The Bible is an utterly fascinating history lesson, if you don't take it as the inerrant word of God. Where the stories came from, who brought them together, how they got edited and modified over the centuries... Friedman really makes it into a great detective story! It's a page-turner, and not academically dry or boring at all. The one caveat is that he takes his conclusions a bit further than the evidence currently supports. Even to the point of naming an individual editor, through a series of logical leaps that are just not supported by the data. However, big picture, this is a great read, and a really excellent tool for understanding why the Bible is so weird, and what those little details can tell us, if we look closely. Great book. Withstands multiple readings, as well.
http://amzn.com/0062012622 Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are by Bart D. Ehrman I liked this one as well. He has a ton of talks online, but be warned... he is a better writer than speaker.
In addition to this: I would add Destiny Disrupted.
Destiny Disrupted looks like a great read. I've been looking for something just like it
So I've heard it said that many Islamic cultures were at the forefront of scientific investigation sometime after the Greeks but before Europeans. I never hear about any specific Islamic scholars or their accomplishments though. Does the book touch on anything like that?
Well, by "many Islamic cultures" we're talking primarily about the Abbasid Caliphate, who had a religious arrangement whereby scholars were must-have prestige employees because interpreting the Koran was a great way to find new truths and you had to be scholarly for that. As such, knowledge flourished... until the inevitable fundamentalist backlash. Not that things ever got as bad as the Dark Ages but the Golden Age of Islam was at its peak while Europe was at its low. And yes. The book covers Islam from Mohammed to about 2010.
Sounds comprehensive. And with blackbootz recommendation, I'm sure it's a page turner.
Just be aware Zinn can come off as a little self-righteous and makes no attempt to hide his bias. While the later can be refreshing in history, I find the former limits me to about twenty pages of Zinn before I put it down and don't bother with him for another year (or preferably longer).
http://amzn.com/080271529X The story of longitude. great read.
here you go, a bit different list. hand hurts so sorry for the formatting.
Not historical per se, but Vladimir Pozner's Parting with Illusions takes a good hard look at the Soviet Russia from the perspective of who amounts to a French-American; in fact, I was dissappointed by just how much he talks about the country and not himself in his own autobiography. Pozner spent his earlier days in the Nazi-occupied Paris and fled, with his family, to the US afterwards when he was very young. His family then immigrated (is that the right word?) to the Soviet Russia, given that Pozner's father was a communist in heart (which the son inherited, until the illusion broke). If you're curious about what it was like in Russia right after the Second World War, it's the book for you. It got me, a native Russian, by surprise due to the book telling about the - I believe the name is - the Putsch in Moscow in 1991 that led to the disbandment of the Soviet Union. Nowhere in the books or in school have we ever discussed this or even touched upon it; I think neither we did so in the uni history courses, which is a shame.
Ooh have you made it through Genghis Kahn? I've heard so many legends about the man but never read a single book on him and certainly never covered him in school.
Yes, it's a very short book. I listed good digestable books rather than more academic history, though I have a Master's in American history and can give you some of that too if you like. These are all very good easy reads and a great way to get into the field in a meaningful way. The Mongols are definitely worth reading about. They're something of a unique story in world history. No other empire was quite like theirs.
I'd love some good academic books too. Long books and big words don't scare me. The only thing is I'll probably get read them farther in the future. It only seems to make sense to go through the shorter digestible one's before diving into a phone book written for experts. Plus I'm already in the midst of like three other thick pieces of tree. I hate to spread myself too thin because I just end up not finishing the books.
Thank you. It should have occurred to me that this question would have been asked before. That second list looks particularly interesting. My dad knew a guy back in college who dropped out, but before he did he went to all his professors and asked for a list of the 10 most important books in their respective subjects. I think the dude became a CEO or something eventually.
Asking the same question is completely fine (even encouraged!), just thought it'd be useful to provide you with some that may or may not be posted this time around.
Much appreciated. By the way, have you read Chaos by James Gleick? It's an exposition on Chaos Theory for the layperson (which I realize you probably aren't after glancing at your profile). He goes pretty in depth about Hendrik Lorentz and the origin of your username.
Simon Winchester: The Map that Changed the World; Krakatoa; The Man who loved China; The Meaning of Everything, etc. Mark Kurlansky: Cod; Salt; The Big Oyster Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower Tim Weiner: Legacy of Ashes
Legacy of Ashes looks right up my alley. Thanks
Hahaha I just looked it up and the CIA has an official position on the book. Don't know if this makes it more or less credible but I'm still down to read it. Check it Y'all:
Whoa. Apparently the CIA considers it credible enough to publish a rebuttal. I actually find it hard to believe they would do that. Why wouldn't they just ignore it?
It made a pretty big splash when it came out. The CIA had also just been "dismantled" by the Bush administration, itself at a low ebb, and the damn WMDs were very much not going to be found. Legacy of Ashes pretty much captured the lowest PR nadir of the CIA since Carter cleaned house, and it captured it at a time when the country was eager to read about large 3-letter agencies getting their comeuppance.
I've got no answer for you, but to be honest if the CIA didn't consistently do things that people found baffling they wouldn't be much of an intelligence agency.
I don't know man, if you really don't know anything a textbook is seriously the way to go. If you doubt you'll finish a textbook, specific books can be found, but you'll have to pick a time period and area of the world first or it's hopeless.
Fair point. I suppose it'd be hyperbole for me to say I don't know anything in the subject, but certainly less than I'd like. But at the end of the day, a textbook is still a book. Which ones did you like? Which would you avoid? Heard of any good ones but haven't read them? I still wanna hear about it.
How curious--could you explain? If one doesn't know anything about a subject, what would be a better introduction than a well written textbook? In my earlier attempts to acquire the knowledge one gains in college on my and for free, I would audit classes, listen to lectures, and buy and read textbooks to try to engage myself with material. (This happened before I realized that the point of college was paying for a degree which serves as proxy of my intelligence and socialization, which frustrated my attempts to be informed only a lot.) What should I have done differently than buy a textbook?
Textbooks are written by a committee to appease elected school board members and educational committees to be sold to students that have no choice and zero unmotivated interest in the subject. It is perfectly reasonable to find a textbook about biology with no chapter about evolution because Texas won't buy it if it has one. College textbooks aren't much better - they are a catch-all overview of a subject as described to eliminate all controversy whose narrative is sculpted in such a way that retention of key facts and figures can be interrogated at regular intervals for the purposes of easy grading. There is nothing readable about a textbook. There is nothing in a textbook that will draw you in - to the contrary, a textbook is designed to shove an arbitrary, selected-by-committee period down the throats of people who have no choice but to read it in the amount of time allotted by another group of professionals that don't give the first fuck about the material or its importance. A nonfiction book, on the other hand, is one author's exploration of a subject following her narrative and what she thinks is important, using her voice to explain and elaborate on facts that you might otherwise find uninteresting. Here, check it: That's the opening paragraph of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, a book about WWI and its causes. If that shit doesn't give you frisson, if it doesn't get marshal music playing in your head, if it doesn't make the Game of Goddamn Thrones leap to the forefront of your imagination you're dead inside. It sure as fuck makes you want to keep reading. Compare and contrast: There aren't a lot of college courses that cover WWI explicitly. AP World History classes give it a chapter. Lewis & Clark College, a decidedly liberal arts place, uses The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War. The most popular AP book appears to be World Civilizations: The Global Experience. Neither book so much as mentions Edward VII.“So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and green and blue and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens – four dowager and three regnant – and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again."
So a textbook is useful to the extent that it helps its reader pass a class or a test. Whereas a (non-fiction) book is useful to the extent that its author manages to convey his or her reasons for setting out to write the book in the first place; for conveying what they found interesting or remarkable, not (as determined by the bevy of textbook publishers) what's gonna be on a test. I agree. I think that I took a slightly incredulous tack earlier because I imagine a chemistry, or even a psychology, textbook to be prima facie and less controversially useful, more than a textbook on history could be, although it is history that this entire post is concerned with. Thank you for the insight. And like I said, I am an abiding fan of non-fiction. Already on page 87 of Destiny Disrupted.
Textbooks are didactic. Non-fiction is autodidactic. This is by design: "what math do I need in order to understand physics?" is an externally-guided search. It also holds true for liberal arts: "What songs should I listen to in order to understand the influence of music on American culture?" is not a question you can solve yourself without a whole bunch of research and exploration. However, "what are the cool parts of physics?" becomes an autodidactic search because "cool" is a controversial qualifier. Likewise, "I want to know more about Bruce Springsteen" is not a quest that should be informed by committee. This is an autodidactic discussion. "I'm interested in exploring my historical blind spots" is not something that should be answered with textbooks. It's like suggesting someone learn more about the events that led to September 11 by reading this thing.
Yeah I have read a lot of 101 level books with titles like The History of.... Art, Architecture, Psychology, Weapons, etc. and really enjoy those. You are right though that reading textbook like books is certainly not for everyone but is an excellent way to get a subject overview and will have citations for other material if something in particular interests you.
Cabeza de Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America. Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca gets lost in the America's. It's an unbelievable report of the pre-European southwest. It painted a wonderful picture of the beauty of Native American culture. I read it for a European History course as a dual view of Native Americans during European colonization.
Much appreciated. I literally just found another book on my shelf called The Indian Heritage of America by Alvin M. Josephy Jr. and got really excited at the prospect of diving into that oft neglected side of things.