Reading Still Matters

Posts

Book Review: Rubicon by Tom Holland

Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic is the first in a series of books on ancient Rome by the famous popular history writer Tom Holland. The other two are Pax and Dynasty. And what a page turner Rubicon is! My biggest complaint about this book is that I found myself reading way faster than I wanted to read. It’s like that suspenseful novel that you race through because you need to get to that next page. And that’s despite the fact that I knew where things were going to end up. Check it out on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/4uvDdxj The book starts in 49 B.C. as Julius Caesar and his legions contemplate crossing a small border river called the Rubicon. No Roman general is allowed to cross that border without authorization and so...

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

A book I have wanted to read for some time is Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin . It was written back in 2010, but remains one of if not the only comprehensive look at the mass atrocities committed by the Soviet Union first, and then Nazi Germany later, during the period of time between the early 1920s to the late 1940s. Check it out on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/4uvDdxj Bloodlands does a great job of putting this period into a single, unified history that shows how both the Soviets and the Germans operated independently, in coordination, and in response to each other’s actions in terms of the repression of minorities and perceived enemies. Basically, the title refers to a specific geographic region in Central and Eastern Europe that lies east of Berlin but west of Moscow. The main focus was on the Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) and the western areas of Russia. These were the ...

Book Review: The Plantagenets by Dan Jones

I have finally read one of Dan Jones's history books. I had already dipped into Jones’s historical fiction, so I was feeling a little sheepish that I hadn’t read one of his histories. And what better place to start than with The Plantagenets . The Plantagenets is Brown’s sweeping narrative history of a line of English kings known today as the Plantagenets. Check it out on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/3QvtVDu Jones covers 245 years and 8 kings of England, from Henry II to Richard II. For a chronology of 8 separate kings, the book manages to be sweeping, fast-paced narrative history that really gives you the feel of what it would have been like to be a king or noble in medieval England between 1154 to 1399. But he also manages to connect some important themes of English public and cultural development, such as the transformation of the political power in the Commons, as well as the notion of the Kings responsibility to his citizens as represented in the Magn...

Book Review: The Republic of Pirates

The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down by Colin Woodard is a fun overview of the so-called Pirates Republic that operated out of the Bahamas during the Golden Age of Piracy from 1715–1725. It explores how notorious outlaws, including Blackbeard, Samuel Bellamy, and Charles Vane, formed the "Flying Gang" to establish a pirates' haven before their continuous predations on regional merchant shipping forced a crackdown on their activities. Buy it on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4xhlCfd The Republic of Pirates isn’t just a narrative history of the Golden Age of Piracy. Woodward advances the argument that the Pirates Republic was a political, possibly revolutionary project, based on democratic and egalitarian values. While pirates often behaved in ways that were more egalitarian than on navy or merchant vessels, I found it difficult to buy into the narrative that the pirates were there...

The Eagle and the Hart by Helen Castor

I recently completed The Eagle and the Hart by Helen Castor. I read it as part of my Quarter 2 Historathon reads (tbat's a YouTube thing). Castor's book is all about the life stories of Richard of Bordeaux (Richard II) and Henry of Bolingbroke (Henry the IV). The two men were cousins, but never close. Richard was brave but no soldier and Henry was the standard of medieval of chivalry. Conflict was inevitable... well, at least in hindsight. Buy it on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4vHbxGQ In fact, Richard wasn't a great king and he became increasingly paranoid over time. Near the end, he maintained the throne by keeping the nobles in a state of permanent fear using a number of methods that actually seem pretty modern in terms of their psychological impact. For example, Richard required the lords to provide general statements of guilt that were to be reviewed by a special commission. What if you made a general admission of guilt? How would it be ...

Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire

One of my favourite subjects to read about is adventure at sea, from shipwrecks, treasure hunts to voyages of discovery. I am from the prairies of Canada, so the ocean is always fascinating. And so Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire by Julian Sancton was exactly the kind of book I like to pick up. Neptune’s Fortune is a non-fiction page turner that tells the story of Roger Dooley’s a 30-year obsession to find the San José. Buy it on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4vHbxGQ The San Jose was a Spanish galleon that sunk in 1708 off the coast of Colombia near its destination port of Cartagena. And it was loaded with a massive treasure of silver and gold extracted from the mines and people of south America by force. The San Jose was that Spanish treasure ship that every explorer wanted to find. Basically, this ship was the holy grail of treasure ships. Rumored to be full of gold and silver at the time it sailed, the ...