Books on history

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by Peadar Ó Guilín

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul M. Kennedy is a dense, but mind-opening read. You'll never fall for propaganda again. It's also the book of choice on the subject for lots of famous politicians. It has certainly changed the way I think about conflict.

I second this one. Very good indeed.

[ny1love]

Originally Posted by pshrynk

David McCullough's books are all pretty much very readable and anjoyable. Path Between the Seas, Truman, and John Adams are three that I have read.

I was going to say the same.I enjoyed "Truman" exceedingly. The author has a gift of unleashing a weave of very interesting and well researched narrative and material, it is no wonder that he is a Pulitzer Prize winner.

I have also heard great things about William Manchester's "American Caesar" which is a biography of Douglas MacArthur.Other than McCullough, Manchester was the only author whom two highly respected and somewhat overly conflicting historians agreed on being one of the top 5 American history authors of the last 100 years.It will be interesting to read about MacArthur's side of the story about his differences with Truman.

I also have on my list Ted Sorensen's "Counselor". It promises to be interesting, if anything just to see how Mr. Sorensen, J.F Kennedy's counsel and alleged ghostwriter of "Profiles in Courage" will address the accusation, most notably from CBS' Mike Wallace ( "60 Minutes" and also in his book and it's accompanying DVD "Between Me and You")

I am also interested in the thoughts of foreign leaders and current events, and the middle east is a hot region now, so I will read former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf "In The Line Of Fire". Just to get his perspective and If nothing else see how can a man cling to power with so much violence and repeated assasination attempts.

By now you can tell I love biographies, If I will have the time I would probably take on "Gray Wolf: The Life of Kemal Ataturk" the secular Turks revere him while the religious are not so crazy about him.This book inspired Anwar Sadat so much it changed his life.I want to know the challenges of nation building in Ataturk's time, and how did he persuade a Muslim country deeply rooted in the traditions of the Ottoman empire and the epitomy of ombudsmanship into one of the best examples of secularism in the Muslim world.

But first I have to finish Samuel Huntington's critically acclaimed masterpiece "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order"

By the way Fareed Zakaria's "The Post American World" is a good read, if one can argue that it is just a clever update (more facts and figures, more recent events and interconnections) on his late Professor's epic book "The Clash of Civilizations"

What do you think?

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by ny1love

I

What do you think?

I think after reading that, you are going to fit in here just fine.........

[Faenad]

Great thread for history buffs, added it to my favorites!

Since my last post I read this, which enters my must-read list : "war in Human civilization" by Azar Gat.

His writing is clear and very readable, but it's not a light read. You need to concentrate and often you stop to thought about the concepts he present.
http://www.amazon.com/War-Human-Civi...3873823&sr=1-1

[garygibsonsf]

For what it's worth, I picked up two history ebooks - the first is London: A Biography by Peter Ackroyd, which has a lot of good reviews on UK Amazon. And it's been recommended to me in the past.

"Ackroyd's London is no mere chronology. Its chapters take on such varied themes as drinking, sex, childhood, poverty, crime and punishment, sewage, food, pestilence and fire, immigration, maps, theatre and war. We learn that gin was "the demon of London for half a century", and that "it has been estimated that in the 1740s and 1750s there were 17,000 'gin-houses'." Fleet Street was an area known for its "violent delights" where "a 14-year-old boy, only 18 inches high, was to be seen in 1702 at a grocer's shop called the Eagle and Child by Shoe Lane." By the mid 19th century "London had become known as the greatest city on earth." By 1939 "one in five of the British population had become a Londoner."

The other is The Man Who Loved China (Book, Bomb and Compass in the UK), which concerns Joseph Needham's attempt to discover why China stopped innovating in the 15th Century rather than going on to become a world-dominating technological empire. From Amazon US:

"In The Man Who Loved China, Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman, builds on his success in writing about eccentric British intellectuals. Needham makes a great subject. A Cambridge University polymath who made his youthful mark as a biochemist, he was also a nudist, a performer of English folk dances involving ankle bells and sticks, an accordion player and an active Communist. His happy marriage to chemist Dorothy Needham survived his lifelong passion for his mistress, Lu Gwei-djen, the biochemist who taught him Chinese and collaborated with him on his master project. Their "peculiarly organized love life" was so cordial that the three lived on the same Cambridge street and often took tea together. Above all, Needham was an indefatigable researcher, whether he was stranded by a broken truck in northwest China's desert or working long hours in his Cambridge study so crammed with materials that assistants were sometimes chosen for their small size.

Needham's career shifted dramatically in 1943, when his government tapped him to establish a Sino-British cultural and scientific exchange behind the front lines of Japanese-occupied China. From Chongqing, a base in the interior to which the Nationalist government had fled, Needham provided struggling Chinese scientists with laboratory equipment and textbooks while pursuing his research on Chinese inventions.

Needham's notable side trips included one to the Dunhuang caves in Western China, where the woodblock Diamond Sutra (868 A.D.), the world's first printed book, had been discovered. Along the way, he stopped at Dujiangyan, the great diversion dam project, built around 250 B.C., which was recently in the news because it lies near the epicenter of the horrific Sichuan earthquake. (Miraculously, it seems to have survived.) Needham's journey to southeastern Fujian province was cut short when the Japanese moved in, bombing bridges as he fled back to Chongqing. His intellectual curiosity and energy turned every hair's-breadth wartime escape into an opportunity to gather the materials that would inform his life's work. He kept impeccable notes and shipped out antique manuscripts by the crate."

[lilac_jive]

Let me know how "The Man Who Loved China" is. I've read several of Winchester's books and found them awesome, but I'm not as interested in Chinese history. But maybe I'll change my mind

[Peadar Ó Guilín]

Originally Posted by lilac_jive

Let me know how "The Man Who Loved China" is. I've read several of Winchester's books and found them awesome, but I'm not as interested in Chinese history. But maybe I'll change my mind

I'll add my ditto to that comment. It does sound interesting, although I've heard a few explanations already to the central question of the book.