Reading Still Matters

I finally got around to digging into the fall of the Roman Empire. No, I didn’t read Edward Gibbon’s famous study of the decline and fall of said Roman Empire. Instead, I picked something more recent.   There has been so much new archeology, so much new scientific work on the classical period, that I thought it made sense to read something more contemporary.   I will get to Gibbon someday. Purchase at The Fall of the Roman Empire at Amazon :  https://amzn.to/45tMQT3   Instead, I read The Fall of the Roman Empire, by historian Peter Heather.   In this major reconsideration of the history the collapse of the western Roman Empire, Heather argues that Rome did not fall because of the decline of Roman martial virtue, internal moral decay or economic collapse, or even the spread of Christianity. Instead, Heathers argues that centuries of Roman friction with the Germanic peoples across the Rhine transformed neighboring these tribes into economically more advanced, ...

I finally got around to reading The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land  by medieval historian Thomas Asbridge.  The Crusades is a sweeping, authoritative single-volume history of the holy wars fought between Western European Christians and Near Eastern Muslims from 1095 to 1291. In my humble opinion, this single volume history of the crusades is the best place to start if you want to dig into the history and learn more about the era. See it on Amazon: https://amzn.to/43YO3kH And I do think the history of the crusades is very relevant to the world of today. With ongoing conflict in the middle east, the crusades often is deployed by leaders, political pundits and propagandists on various sides of the conflict. Politicians and propagandists both distort facts for their respective arguments and pushes, and so its great to have a good foundation in the actual facts. And Asbridge does a great job of setting out the 200-year history of the crusades, from the motivations of west...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

I was recently in the United States and dropped into Barnes & Noble to pick up a book (I am Canadian). Turns out that I grabbed The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire by Tore Skeie. I am not going to lie, I mean I think Vikings are pretty cool, but really I was attracted to the book by the cover and the crazy good title.  A thoughtful package to a book can open covers so to speak, even if a book can't be judged by its cover. Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/3RNMXpb When I started reading it, I was surprised to learn that Tore Skeie is a Norwegian historian and that the book was translated from the Norwegian language. The Wolf Age (originally published in Norway as Hvitekrist ) is his first major work to be translated into English and it really does have a Scandinavian centered perspective, so it was very cool.  For the most part, books on Norse history I have read have been from the English perspective. The Wolf Ag...

So I just completed my second Erik Larson book - the first being Dead Wake . And honestly, I was pretty excited to read Devil in the White City because I did enjoy Dead Wake quite a lot, and I had heard a number of good things about Devil in the White City . The questions for me were whether I would like Devil in the White City and whether I am going to enjoy reading all of Larson's book. My logic is simple - if I enjoy the first two books of his that I read then I am going to enjoy them all.  Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4eaoOjV So Devil in the White City was an excellent work, I really enjoy his compelling but clean writing style. He is often compared to novelists, and I think that's fair. What he really does well is put the reader in the shoes of the people he is writing about. Now, the fact that he does this well may not be something everyone likes. For those history purists who don't like the liberties of imagination that are necessary to write this way may...

I recently completed Poland: A History by Adam Zamoyski which had been sitting on my bookshelf for a while now. The title should give you a pretty good hint at what this one is about, basically it’s an overview of the history of the Polish people and Polish state from around the tenth century up to the end of the Lech Walesa period following the Soviet collapse.      And for those of you who have been reading Polish history for a while now, this might be a book you have come across before in a different guise. Zamoysky originally published this back in 1987 as The Polish Way , although this is a revised and updated edition which re-evaluates Poland’s past with a "fresh eye." Basically, we have a general extension of the time covered as the book now includes more about post-Soviet developments. So, if you have already read The Polish Way , then be forewarned. I haven’t read The Polish Way, so I am not sure how different it actually is. Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn...

The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943 by James Holland is a gripping account of the Allied invasion of mainland Italy from the beach landings near Messina and Salerno. The campaign in Italy was meant to be short and low risk, but it turned out to be anything but.  Between September and December 1943, the Allied powers and the Germans engaged in brutal combat that essentially stalled at the Gustav Line south of Rome.  Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4xk5YQ3      Savage Storm is the first book by James Holland that I have read and so I was pretty excited to read it and get a sense of what Holland is all about. I chose Savage Storm because Canada did play a pretty significant role in the fighting and so I wanted to read up on that aspect of the history as well. I am Canadian after all.       And I really enjoyed Savage Storm . Unlike any military history books I have read, Holland used the journals of combatants from both sides t...