Kevin's Watch

Wow I haven't even seen a copy of Guns of August since 1973! Good book.

Danlo,

I really enjoyed it. Well written, tight prose. It gave nice biographical backgrounds for all the major players without overloading the reader. Cogent and interesting analysis. I can see why it won the Pulitizer.

Reading A Winter In China, but it probably doesn't belong in this forum. Historical fiction set around the rape of Nanking. Very good, and apparently accurate, but not strictly a history book.

--A

Just finished 'Rise of American Democracy'. Very good book, from Jefferson to Lincoln.

Read 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (I think that counts as history), and now on 'The Fifties', by David Halberstam.

Reading 'The Arabs - A History' by Eugene Rogan. Just reached the establishment of the state of Israel after WW2. My what a mess the whole thing is and no wonder the whole area is in a state of turmoil to this day. My country should hang it's head in shame for this running sore that it has bequeathed to the world. The invovement of the UK from the release of the Balfour Declaration onward was a recipie for dissaster.

Just finished 1776 by David McCullough.
It was good.
I thought I was well read on the Siege of Boston but there was a lot I didn't know.

Finishing up "Guns Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond.
It's a fascinating look at how those three things affected human development and advancement throughout world history.

I just went through 'Guns, Germs and Steel'. I couldn't finish it. First, I generally stay away from ancient history, b/c I feel too much guesswork based on fossils. Second, I don't buy a lot of the assumptions. And third, the writing just never hooked me.

So now I'm on 'Napoleon's Wars', by Charles Esdaile. Kind of dry, but I'll keep plowing.

peter, sounds like an interesting read. Do you think its pretty objective, as much as anything can be anyway?

If you want a good book about the Napoleanic wars, (well, the Penninsular wars anyway), I recommend Lady Elizabeth Longford's Wellington: Years of the Sword.

--A

Diarmud McCulloch's 'History of Christianity' is a whopping great tome but somehow keeps one on board right the way through, and Nial Ferguson's history of the twentieth century 'The War of the World' just beggars belief - how could so much death occur in so short a period of time!

I'm reading Sailing The Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, by Thomas Cahill.

It's a book about the ancient Greek contribution to modern civilization. So far: Adding vowels to the alphabet, the Phoenician alphabet that the Greek was based on didn't have them, made clear the meaning of what one was trying to get across. Also, writing was no longer used for commercial or religious purposes. For another example, Achilles of The Iliad was a more revered hero than Odysseus of The Odyssey through most of history. It was only after the petty religious wars of the Sixteenth Century that opinion changed from the petulant Achilles to Odysseus, who only wanted to go home.

...where burning Sappho loved and sang...

Odysseus...poor bastard...

I really like how he's portrayed in David Gemmel's Troy series.

--A

A great quote. On the chapter on Solon and laws:

The word the Athenians used for their Assembly was Ekklesia, the same word used in the New Testament for Church (and it is the greatest philological irony in all of Western history that this word, which connoted equal participation in all deliberations by all members, came to designate a kind of self-perpetuating, self-protective Spartan gerousia - which would have seemed patent nonsense to Greek speaking Christians of the New Testament times, who believed themselves to be equal members of their assembly.)

A gerousia was a Spartan council of elders.

So, he's saying the word came to be associated with hierarchy? The irony being it was originally associated with equal participation?

I'm currently reading "History of the Decline and Fall of Roman Empire". Its on my kindle, so I don't know quite how large it is, but I've been reading for 4 days, and its still at 1%.

Hahaha, 6 Volumes.

--A

Yea, I've taken a break. Started "Christianity", by McCulloch.

The Search for the Trojan War by Michael Woods.

One of my pick-ups at the Newberry Book fair, A Distant Mirror, by Barbara Tuchman, on 14th century (black death era) Europe.

www.amazon.com/First-Man-Life-Neil-Arms ... 074325631X

Half way through this.
Kinda sucks.
Personal family stuff....I know, it's a biography.

Second half gets into the Apollo stuff.
Getting into lots of good info I hadn't heard about before.

I just finished reading The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Battle for Europe, by Andrew Wheatcroft. A take on the rivalry between the two dynasties. The book does a good job on the background of the siege of Vienna in 1683, but kind of feels a little lacking when it recounts the later history, when for a variety of reasons they became friendly in the 19th century, ultimately being allies in WWI.

Just finished reading:
Cleopatra: last queen of Egypt
- by Joyce Tyldesley.
Enjoyed this book, but frustrated at how little information there is on this Queen of Egypt. Most of the historical documentation is from the Roman perspective, most of which is biased.
But there are 'glimmers of gold' behind the mask of propaganda, myth, and legend.


Nicholas Reeves
The Complete Tutankhamun
The King: The Tomb: The Royal Treasure

Will be reading next,
The Wisdom of Ptah-Hotep (the oldest book in the world)
- translated by Christian Jacq