Reading Still Matters

Greystone Books recently sent me Buffalo Lessons: How Bison Returned to Banff National Park by the late wildlife biologist Karsten Heuer.  Buffalo Lessons chronicles the remarkable story of the reintroduction of wild bison to the Canadian Rockies in 2017. For thousands of years, plains bison roamed the mountains of what would become Alberta until hunting pushed them completely out of the area and almost to extinction. Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4441T5d I was excited to read this book because Banff National Park is just down the road from me, and I followed the reintroduction of the bison into the Park closely. But like all news reporting, the story was fragmented and I never really heard much about the bison after that initial period of their introduction. And so, I was really looking forward to reading about the entire story. The book itself is relatively short, written for a general audience and includes a lot of beautiful photographs of bison in the area, as well ...

I recently read The Guns of August by the late Barbara W. Tuchman. It’s a book that I have always wanted to read, since this Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative history book has been read and reviewed glowingly by so many history fans!  How many history books written in the early 1960s are still talked about in such glowing terms? Not many, that’s for sure. See it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4eKM1cJ By way of overview, The Guns of August provides a detailed, dramatic account of the prelude to and the opening month of World War I, tracking the diplomatic failures and ultimately the military maneuvers of August 1914 up to the first battle of the Marne.   Tuchman opens the book with the 1910 funeral of King Edward VII, which served as a grand gathering of Europe's royalty and masked the underlying geopolitical rivalries. The men and women that would soon be lined up against each other in the trenches, visited London for the funeral.   Its amazing to think it was just 4...

Before & After Alexander is a work of history that challenges the traditional, highly romanticized "great man" myth of Alexander the Great.  Yes, it’s true.  Columbia University professor Richard A. Billows attempts a take down of the world’s greatest general, all by analyzing the geopolitics of the ancient world before his birth and after his sudden death. Notably, he mostly skips the period of Alexander’s time as general of the armies of Macedon. Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/43MlHtX But let’s dig in a bit.   Alexander can basically be split into two parts, with a short part that acts as a pivot in the middle.    The first part is all about the formation of Macedon prior to Alexander’s time as king, and primarily during the period when Alexander’s father Philip built Macedon into a regional power. In fact, there is a great deal of information on the development of Macedon from a historical perspective, including political, cultural and military...

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 ...