History Books S/D

I've read a few others (still slogging through the Oxford's Grand Expectations; tried Braudel) but would love to hear everyone else's suggestions.

I very much like the firsthand account of the Cortes invasion of Mexico, written by Bernal Diaz. The Penguin translation is entitled The Conquest of New Spain.

The story of the Pizarro conquest of the Incas is also prime stuff - high adventure, low cunning, treachery, nobililty, hair's breadth escapes and enough plot twists to sizzle your hair -- but the standard history by Prescott bogs down somewhat. There must be a better one out there, but I didn't find it.

Also, another question... some publishers have put out books that are meant as companion to certain time periods, eg Oxford Companion and Penguin Historical Atlas. Any thoughts on these?

Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt - Heyrman
Lost Discoveries - Teresi
Influenza 1918 - Iezzoni
The Templars - Read
The Freemasons - Ridley
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan - Bix
John Adams; The Great Bridge; The Path Between the Seas; The Johnstown Flood; Truman - McCullough
The Ottoman Centuries - Lord Kinross
The Crusades - Oldenbourg
Paris 1919 - MacMillan
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes - Maalouf
The Saudis - Mackey
Warriors of God - Reston
The Middle East: A History - Fisher and Ochsenwald
Bernard Lewis does some halfway decent stuff on the Middle East and some of Karen Armstrong's books are okay.

This ia an excellent thread!

C. Vann Woodward (anything, but his first book Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel is very good)
Palmer and Colton, World History (basic college-level Euro history text, but wonderfully written; not really fashionable at the moment though)
David Fischer, Albion's Seed (the best piece of American social history I know; very long and very ambitious, and really astonishing)

I'll think of some more later. But it looks like you have enough recommendations for a while.

I generally stick with the Penguins, through when I had to re-read Tactius for college, I tried the Modern Library version and found it slightly more scintillating than the Penguin one. I think there's an annotated Thucydides out there now, which is a FANTASTIC idea: you can't have enough maps and pictures for this kind of history.

The strength of this book is that it explains enough of the physics for the lay person to grasp what the physicists were doing and why, but never relaxs its grip on the narrative thread. It is a story of collaborative science on a massive scale, done by a few dozen intensely interesting people over a period of decades, starting with the Curies and Rutherford and working forward to the Trinity test and bombing of Japan. Excellent stuff.

For a broad brush overview of European History Norman Davies’s Europe is well worth the effort, as his earlier work on Polish history. His book on the ‘Anglo-Celtic Archipelago’, i.e. UK and Ireland The Isles is good but Hugh Kearney’s British Isles is better and has the benefit of brevity. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the nation 1707-1837 is a fascinating work on the making of modern Britain that I believe has become a ‘major canonical text’.

In a glut of books pandering to a morbid fascination with Nazi Germany Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich: A new history stands out for the depth of its analysis. Props too to Golo Man’s History of Germany since 1789, beautifully written.

There is one book I’ve recently read that has made me think deeper and harder over contemporary European History more than any other: Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent:. Absorbing, though provoking and profoundly disturbing.

REVIVAL

And
Search: EP Thompson 'The Poverty of Theory'
Destroy: Isaiah Berlin 'Historical Inevitability'

BUMP!!

What are some modern history books that would provide a readable background on communism? It wouldn't necessarily have to be called "Communism: The Book" or anything. It could just be a particularly meandering biography of some historical figure.

Actually, biographies are my preferred genre these days.

Bump

I read this in French so I don't know how it reads in English but it was an 'important' book in France when it came out.

The Black Book of Communism

While we're giving shout-outs to history books:

The Transformation of European Politics 1763-1848

Some others I have liked.

And if you want an interesting biography, I just finished this:

The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke

The most entertaining "court intrigue" book on communism may well be ]Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Montefiore, some 800+ pages of scheming, sexual imbroglios, paranoia, and happy sunsets at the dacha.

Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 seems to be the best regarded current popular history of the revolutionary era. We're just now getting to the point where ideology doesn't dictate descriptive stance. I haven't read this yet, it stares menacingly at me from the shelf.

For China, I've only read a couple books by Jonathan Spence (the most engaging Western historian of China), recommend The Search for Modern China for sweep into the 20th century, but his forte is reconstructions of Ming & Manchu dynasty China from primary sources, Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-Hsi, The Death of Woman Wang, and The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci are all really amazing works that will cast you into that world at the top, the bottom, and from a visitor's perspective, respectively.

Can anyone recommend an excellent single-volume history of the world?

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I've read and enjoyed J.M. Roberts' New Penguin History of the World. Don't know if I'd call it excellent but it's a serious and v. informative shot at this difficult genre.

xpost

praise the lord!

But I'm hoping for one that will fill in the gap between the first few centuries after j-christ and the end of the world.

I've read and enjoyed J.M. Roberts' New Penguin History of the World.

That happens to be the one I've read as well! I enjoyed it as well (although I think I petered out somewhere in the early Middle Ages, but I'd like to take another spin down world history memory lane and was hoping to start fresh with a new book.

typos/awful grammar galore, but hopefully that made sense.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto's Millennium is definitely worth a read too although you only get the last 1,000 years.

Ah, I'm glad you mentioned that, I remember nearly purchasing it a few years ago but ended up reading something else instead for some reason. Maybe I'll give it a shot. Also, I'm reminded that I invested a good deal of time into Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence (which covers the last 500 years), but found it pretty incomprehensible despite widespread critical acclaim.

There's a one-volume abridgement of Fernández-Armesto's history of the World too, apparently, but I've not read it.

xpost huh, I only knew Barzun from his music theory, didn't know he did other things, but that's certainly some bibliography he's got there.

I've been half wondering about this myself, so question much appreciated!

I loved Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence. It's thick and at times a slog, but every chapter upsets some received notion with insight and elan.

Ha, pretty much everything I've ever read about From Dawn to Decadence was reverential, so I'm not sure what my deal is.

not one volume, and in fact only two volumes of the planned four volumes have been published so far, but I enjoyed Susan Wise Bauer's world history so far:

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however, I don't really know anything about history; these books might be more boring to people more knowledgeable about history than me