Good history books on "other" subjects

[joel]

Besides history of science or of Christianity, which we already talk plenty about here. Here are a few I've read in the past year or so, mainly dealing with the world wars and the twentieth century. Feel free to post more.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder
A fascinating and horrifying coverage of the mass butchering by both dictators. He covers the holocaust in great detail of course, but also lesser-known things such as Stalin's Ukrainian famine, which is perhaps an even greater crime than the gulags. He gives particular attention to Eastern Europe and how both dictators' murderous policies in that region reinforced and fed off each other. Snyder draws extensively on primary sources and never lets you forget that these were real people being brutally massacred or starved, not just numbers.


Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World by Margaret Macmillian
Covers the post-WWI peace conference. The title is somewhat misleading, since Macmillan frequently goes several years into the 1920s to discuss what happened. One realizes in this book just how complicated and backstabby international politics are, with so many countries all over the world having contradictory postwar demands. The impression I got from the book is that the Allies did the best they could with a lot of difficult situations in Europe, while they really screwed up with some of their decisions elsewhere (though of course it's easy to say that with hindsight).

MacMillan also shows sketches interesting portraits of a number of historical characters to help the history come alive. Woodrow Wilson does not come across very well, but neither do most of the national leaders. She does seem a little easy on Lloyd George and she is related to him, but the bias isn't overwhelming.


The First World War by Hew Strachan
A broad look at the conflict. One thing I like about this book is that Strachan covers every region and front of the war, from the western front to obscure theaters like Africa, while most histories of the war focus mostly on the west and say a bit about Eastern Europe. There are also many more photographs than you usually find in a history book (a serious one, not coffee-table books or similar stuff), with lots of black and white photos integrated with the text and even some color photos in the middle! On the negative side, Strachan sometimes ignores or glosses over the human dimension of the conflict and so the book sometimes feels a bit sterile, though the photos help with this. Also, he seems to rush through the postwar settlement.


The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman
I just finished this one. It's a survey of the US and western Europe 20-25 years before WWI. Not really about the causes of the war, but the culture before the war. She covers a huge variety of topics - imperialism in the US, the anarchist assassinations, arguments about whether socialism should be revolutionary, German operas about subjects from Nietszche to the composer's family troubles, peace conferences, and much more. And most of the time Tuchman succeeds in making it all interesting.

World War I is often associated with disillusionment, and it's interesting to read about the optimism and occasionally pessimism of the time in light of what followed. With attitudes toward war, for example, many believed humanity had outgrown it and could live at peace, many said peace was decadent and war was necessary to further evolve the race, and some in Britain were quite scared of German militarism. At times one sees that their time wasn't that different from our own in some ways. Such as the Englishman who bemoaned that too many citizens were more interested in the horse races than what was really going on in the world...sound familiar?

One interesting figure I learned about was Thomas Reed, the US Speaker of the House who first enraged the Democrats by abolishing the "silent filibuster" and then opposed his entire Republican party on the annexation of Hawaii.

[radhika12]

I' m looking for an astrology books which contains about history of astrology....

[himself]

Some other interesting books:
A Thread of Years, by John Lukacs. An odd item. It consists of one semi-novelistic passage - a description, a conversation, etc. - for each year of the 20th century. This is followed by a dialogue between Lukacs and his alter ego on the meaning of the passage. It ends in 1969 because, as Lukacs likes to say, the 20th century was the shortest century in history.

Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution, by Toby Huff. Gives us the adventures of the brave little telescope as it makes its way across Europe, and then to China and Islam. Raises the intriguing question: why did it trigger a scientific revolution in Europe, but nowhere else.

Rubicon, by Tom Holland. Gives an admirable sense of the transition from the Republican world to the Imperial world.

The World of Late Antiquity, by Peter Brown. Despite the evident biases of the author, it gives an admirable sense of the transition from the Classical world to the Medieval world.

The Autumn of the Middle Ages, by Johan Huizinga. Gives an admirable sense of the transition from the Medieval world to the Modern world.

The Passing of the Modern Age, by John Lukacs. Gives an admirable sense of the transition from the Modern world to the Postmodern world.

Barbarians and Romans, by Justine Randers-Pehrson. Covers the years AD 400-800.

The Fall of Rome, by R.A. Lafferty. A peculiar telling of the story of Alaric and his contemporaries by an idiosyncratic writer. In his Prologue of the Persons, he writes

• Theodosius the Emperor, the last who can be called 'Great' without laughing.
  
• Galla Placida, the goblin child and sister of the two young emperors who, at age seventeen and when all the rest of them were cowed, seized control of the Roman Senate and the City and represented the defiance in the last one hundred days of the world.
  
• St. Ambrose in Milan, who believed that the world was to endure.
  
• St. Augustine in Hippo Regius who understood why the world must end, and when. And my favorite:
  
• Radagais, the Ogre, the complete barbarian, who convinced the Roman world that it had falsely applied the name to others.