Reading Still Matters

If you are looking to read nonfiction history that is enlightening and entertaining the here are five great places to start that history reading journey!  Republic of Pirates by Colin Woodard 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 highly acclaimed historical book that explores the Golden Age of Piracy (roughly 1715–1725). Moving past Hollywood tropes, Woodard frames the historic Republic of Pirates as a deliberate, social-political uprising against the brutal colonial powers of the British and Spanish Empires. I liked this one because it used the Pirates' base in the Bahamas as a focal point to framing a story, rather than just going through a list or a chronology of famous pirates.   Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4xhlCfd Fall of Berlin by Antony Beevor The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Antony Beevor is an authoritative, meticulously researched military history book tha...

     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...

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 ...