Reading Still Matters

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...

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...