Hitler at Home

Hitler at Home (Despina Stratigakos)


I got this book as a gift, and I'm glad I did as it's the kind of thing I would never pick for myself, but ended up enjoying quite a bit. The author explores Hitler's, uh, homes, using this as a base to explore the difference between the way Hitler really lived and the image that was projected in propaganda. This is really interesting stuff, and the only complaint I have is that reading about chumps like Hitler decorating their palaces with stolen art can really get your blood boiling. (Of course, on the other hand, reading about all of his chalets and hideouts getting bombed into the ground, looted, and paved over is good for a giggle.) I'd recommend this to anyone, even people with WW2 fatigue - the subject matter is so off the beaten path I couldn't help but be interested.
My one caveat is that if you, like me, take your books out to read while you're eating, you might want to take the dust jacket off this one; fellow guests at TGI Fridays aimed a couple hard stares at me while reading this.


Grade: A-

"A History of Britian in 36 Postage Stamps"

A History of Britain in 36 Postage Stamps (Chris West)

This was an interesting book to read; I know basically nothing about postage stamps, and not a great deal about the period of British history covered (1840 - the modern day). I enjoyed reading it, but the history is very basic, and it mostly just left me wanting more. I can easily recommend this for school kids, history novices, and people with an interest in postage stamps; otherwise I'd probably give it a miss.

Grade: B-

"Marie Antoinette"

Marie Antoinette: The Journey (Antonia Fraser)

Until recently I haven't been a big biography fan; I guess I read some bad ones and was scared off by the boring parts of life even the most interesting among us have. Lately, though, I've come to enjoy them quite a bit, and this one among a few in particular. Fraser's biography (like any good one I suppose) is more than just a history of its subject; it's also a history of the times they lived through, and Fraser brings them to life in sometimes stomach-churning intimacy. (Want to read all about Marie Antoinette and her sister's periods? Here you go!!!!)
Perhaps surprisingly, Marie Antoinette herself comes off as probably the most likable person in the book; I'll admit that by page 100, I was actively rooting for most of the French court to get guillotined. (The nadir for this probably comes on page 102 where ambassadors are giving diamond necklaces to the palace's pets.) That being said, the second half of the book is just as grim as you're probably expecting, and I identified with MA enough that I was uncomfortable reading about life kicking her around. I'd recommend this book heartily, just be prepared for a good cry near the end.

(Bonus out of context quote: "The spanking pace caused much merriment among the waiting crowds of his erstwhile subjects.")

Grade: A-

"The Adventure of English"

The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (Melvyn Bragg)

I was a little let down about this book; I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this seems more like a book for a middle school student. I didn't really learn much; Bragg's writing keeps things moving briskly, perhaps too briskly. At times I felt like a passenger on a train going too fast past some interesting landscape I wanted to stop and check out. This is easy to recommend if you're just starting with this subject, but I had the sinking feeling that I knew more than the author about the subject through most of the book.

Grade: C+

"Fordlandia"

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Jungle City (Greg Grandin)

This is a bit of an odd duck. The author uses the history of the titular Fordlandia plantation in Brazil to explore more general thoughts on the unfulfilled promise of Ford's hope that industrialization would lead to a economically friendly, quasi-socalist, peaceful future. This is interesting stuff, but it doesn't quite mesh with a history of the Fordlandia plantation; I also found it a little brief (years are skipped outright towards the end). This is an interesting little book, but not really that easy to recommend; approach it as a curiosity and I think you'll do fine.

Grade: B-

"Faith and Treason" & "God's Secret Agents" two-fer

Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot (Antonia Fraser)

Apparently I forgot to ever review God's Secret Agents; since it covers some of the same territory as as Faith and Treason, I guess I might as well talk about them both.
Not knowing anything about either one of these books, I lucked out by reading God's Secret Agents first; this book is much larger than the other, and happily it does a lot of scene-setting. It mostly covers the Elizabethan age, with James coming in at the epilogue. Faith and Treason is much smaller, and picks up about where God's Secret Agents leaves off, dispatching Elizabeth in the introduction, and is almost exclusively about James assuming power and the Gunpowder Plot itself. I recommend both books, as they really do work well together, and the story they tell is quite interesting (if incredibly grim at times). That being said, Fraser assumes enough knowledge that I'd probably feel lost without having read God's Secret Agents first. My only caveat is that both these books go into gory detail about the caught Catholics getting tortured; reading about them getting dismembered was no less wince-worthy the second time, unfortunately. Still, I recommend both books, although you might want to slip a palette cleanser in between.

Grades: A

"Empire of Liberty"

Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789 - 1815 [Oxford History of the United States] (Gordon S. Wood)

For a massive history book I really enjoyed, I'm not sure I have much to say here aside from a strong recommendation; The core of this book is a why-didn't-I-learn-this-in-school exploration of the early clash between the Federalists - trying to make America into a European-style Power complete with landed aristocracy - and the Democratic-Republicans under Jefferson, attempting to mold America into a republic full of small farmers. This might not sound that interesting, but if so I'm not doing it justice; some of the truly bizarre ideas (including an attempt to completely outlaw commerce) are really staggering, and this is an easy recommend to anyone even casually interested in American history. Don't let the size scare you off from this gem.

Grade: A

"One Hundred Days"

One Hundred Days: Napoleon's Road to Waterloo (Alan Schom)

This one you can judge by its cover. I guess I'm kind of starting at the end with Napoleon here; spoiler alert. What I liked about this book is that the author didn't just cover Waterloo - in fact, the entire military campaign makes up maybe a fifth of the book. This leaves the rest to what I really wanted to see, namely
Napoleon's governance of France and to a small extent planning for the future (it's to a small extent as he doesn't seem to have thought much past battling the rest of Europe, and of course he never got the chance after that).
That would make it an easy recommend (for history nerds), but there is one warning I'd issue: Schom stops to drop in biographies of all the major players as we run across them. This is puzzling for two reasons; one, I would assume that most readers had the sense (unlike me) to read other books about Napoleon first instead of starting at the end, and would already have this information. Two, the biographies are largely pointless as most of the characters get so little screen time that their introductory biographies are longer than all the rest of the text featuring them put together. I'd say just skip 'em.
Other than this issue, and probably recommending reading this as a endcap, the bulk of the text covers an area of study that's esoteric enough that this is the only book I've seen covering it, and that makes it pretty easy to recommend.

Grade: B+

"1491"

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Charles Mann)

I feel a little deceived by this book. What I was expecting was a book all about the people native to the Americans before Columbus. There is some of this material in the book - and these parts are quite good - but more than half of the book is a history of white people's understanding of the history, not the history itself.
This is not exactly what I wanted. I understand that some material about the way that modern people think about the subject can be useful, but there's just too much for me, and it really started getting on my nerves reading page after page about it. I want to hear about the history; I don't necessarily find it so interesting to be hearing about the theory and ways of thinking about the history. (It also has the effect of once again making the story about white people.)
Ultimately, I just found that there was too much of this material in the book. What parts of it that there are about the Americas before Columbus are quite good, but there simply isn't enough of this to make this an easy recommend. Check it out of the library and just read the parts that are directly recounting the history.

Grade: B-

"Life in a Medieval City"

Life in a Medieval City (Joseph & Frances Gies)

Just what it says on the cover - this is a slim little book (200 or so small pages) detailing everyday life in Troyes, circa 1250, covering everything from what a housewife did all day to table manners to the economic and religious systems (although, strangely, not much about the political setup). It's quite interesting; the only time I found my attention drifting was while the authors were describing clothing styles, which was also an issue with The Time Traveler's Guide Guide to Medieval England. This book isn't nearly so weighty or in-depth as that one, but I enjoyed it almost as much. Some Amazon reviews mentioned that this book may contain terms and phrases that are a little too advanced for the beginning reader, but that didn't really bug me; I had more trouble with the untranslated French terms, and I feel confident recommending this one to everybody.

Grade: A-

"A History of Future Cities"

A History of Future Cities (Daniel Brook)

I knew I was in trouble with this book right from page three:

Orient is both a noun and a verb - the noun means east; the verb means to place oneself in space - but its two meanings are intertwined. An individual lost in the wilderness can place herself in space (orient herself) because she knows the sun rises in the east (the Orient). The disorientation imparted by St. Petersburgh, Shanghai, Mumbai and Dubai results from their being located in the East but purposefully built to look as if they are in the West. Their occidental looks are anything but accidental.

What we have here is a misleadingly titled book comprised of four not terribly well written, hyperbolic, boring histories of "pop up" cities - the aforementioned St. Petersburgh, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai (putting aside that Shanghai is over a thousand years old and Mumbai may have been continuously inhabited since the Stone Age). I'm gonna be real here: This is a book not only without a central premise, but as I hope is demonstrated from the snippet above, soaked in nonsense. The actual histories themselves are, and I know I said this already but it bears repeating, not well written and boring. I can't recommend not reading this book enough.

Grade:
F-

"Lenin's tomb"

Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (David Remnick)

I've heard it said that "the plural of anecdote is not data", and this is what I kept thinking while reading this book. It's kind of a mess; Remnick's narrative history pieces aren't in order, and the 2 - 3 page anecdotes he keeps dropping in feel totally disconnected from the surrounding material. I could see this book working either as a straight narrative history or as a collection of essays, but the length of the anecdotes didn't really work for me, and between that and Remnick's jumping around, the book never really cohered into anything interesting. There's no thread or premise holding the book together, and I dumped it after fifty puzzling pages. Avoid.

Grade: D-

"The Three Orders"

The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Georges Duby, translation by Arthur Goldhammer)

I have to give Barnes and Noble some credit here; As much as I complain about their history section being nothing but Hitler and annoying gimmicks (ex. Salt), they've launched a line of books called "Barnes & Noble Rediscovers" that re-prints old, interesting books like this. I then have to remove almost all said credit because they felt the need to stick not one, but TWO of those horrible price stickers on the dust jacket, the kind that refuse to come off and leave a big smear of old glue and sad paper that you can't remove even with water and a paper towel.
So what was I talking about? Right, this book. I'm glad this book was "rediscovered", because it's probably the most readable book out there about the schema of medieval French society being made up of the titular three orders, those who pray, those who fight, and those who work the land, and oh man does that ever sound tedious now that I'm typing it out. I know it sounds bad, but I found this book to be pretty interesting and surprisingly readable. My only caveat is that you really have to pay attention, because if you let your mind wander away from the text you can skip down half a page without realizing it and become totally lost. I suppose saying it's the best concentration-demanding 400 page tome on the organization of medieval society isn't much of a compliment, but if you've made it this far without being scared off, I'd recommend at least checking it out of your local library.

Grade: B?

"Boring Postcards USA"

Boring Postcards USA (Martin Parr)

Unsurprisingly, this is the American version of the one and only Boring Postcards. At first, I thought the author had lost it, as the first couple pages feature postcards that are, if not exactly thrill a minute, at least sport some mildly pleasent greenery; This does not last as the helicopter shots of planned expressways quickly give way to thrilling highway onramps, nondescript car washes, and pictures of Krispy Kreme donut boxes. Boring Postcards USA proceeds to deliver exactly what it promises, with no text except what I assume are captions from the postcards themselves - I certainly don't know of anyone who would describe the soulless recktangle that is Atlanta's new terminal building as "magnificent". The result is bizzarely fascinating; I had to stop myself from just reading the entire book in one sitting as I kept wanting to turn the page and see how Parr would top the images I was currently looking at. Highly recommended.
Grade: A

"The Army of the Caesars"

The Army of the Caesars (Michael Grant)

This is a history book detailing the relationship between the army and the Roman state, covering in detail from Augustus up through when the military got the final upper hand after the collapse of the Tetrachy system. It also goes into detail about the armament, pay, and living conditions of the common soldiers to provide some context. I guess that probably sounds pretty tedious, but I found it quite interesting. If you're a Roman history nerd - which I assume would be the only type of person interested in this book - some of this may already be familiar to you (almost certainly the account of Augustus defeating Mark Antony), but Grant ensures that the material is never boring. The book has been out of print since the 70's and I was going to say my only caveat is that it may be tricky tracking down a copy, but there's currently like 97 used copies on Amazon (I recommend Powell's - it's a few bucks extra, but you can't beat their service), so you don't have any excuse.

Grade: A

"The Secrets of Alchemy"

The Secrets of Alchemy (Lawrence Principe)

I feel like I'm repeating myself lately when making statements that my biggest complaint about a book is that I wanted more of it, but I can't help it. This is a slim little tome (Amazon says 296 pages, but I think the main text barely topped 200) - in this small space the author fits in both a history of alchemy and several practical experiments he conducted following the ancient instructions. This is rather fascinating, not to mention pretty educational, and as alluded to above, my only gripe was that I wanted the author to go more in-depth on the history and do more experiments with the classical recipes. On the other hand, I don't want to give the impression that the author is only skimming the surface; the history section goes so far as to include a section on the cultural impact of alchemy and chemistry, including several poems that are more fun than they have any right to be when read aloud to your wife at Applebee's. So uh, recommended.

Grade: A

"Yesterday's Tomorrows"

Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future (Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan)

After finishing a book but before writing a review, I like going to Amazon and reading the reviews there to sharpen my own thoughts. Most of the time this helps me distill down what I want to write, but sometimes the Amazon authors sum it up so succiently that I'm thrown for a loop. In this case, the top rated Amazon review for this book is titled "Fun but not enough", and that really does sum the whole book up in four words. This book was written to accompany a museum exhibition, and as a result it's stuck inbetween two poles - it isn't just photographs of old visions of the future but neither is it a comprehensive history of the idea, and ultimately it fails to succeed totally on either level. It comes closer with the photographs, which are quite nice but there aren't enough of; the accompanying text gives enough information to whet the appetite but not much else. There's two other minor complaints I have, one being that the book is a little unusually shaped and hurt my arm after holding it up for two chapters (rest it on the sofa!), and the second being that the book came out in 1983, so there's one section that reads like "Will Xanadu foam houses catch on?!" (Spoiler alert: lol, no.) To be fair, neither of these are big complaints - the book's shape isn't that out of the ordinary for an art book, and being old happens to all of us eventually. Added all up, this is probably not the book you're looking for unless your collection must have every book about the retro future, in which case you don't even need to read this review, so, um.

Grade: B-

"The Sugar Barons"

The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies (Matthew Parker)

This history of the West Indies is excellent, and my only issue with it is the length - it feels a little weird saying a 464 page book is too short, but here we are. Parker covers from the initial settlements down to about the fourth generation of decedents, which is where things start really falling apart (don't feel bad for them, they all had a ton of slaves). I guess this makes sense as a stopping point, both because the West Indies' time as an important player on the world stage is coming to an end and the dynasties we've been following tumble towards the dustbin of history, but I did find myself wanting more all the same. I guess that's not really much of a complaint, really, so that should tell you how interesting I found the book. I guess I should also mention that I found some humor in the author's quotes of 400 year old written English (as when a general "very nobelly rune behind a tree"), all the more so when they're using modern-sounding swear words (some sick soldiers, we're told, are "nothing but Shiting, for thay wose in a uery sad condichon..."). So uh, recommended.

Grade: A-

"The Swerve"

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Stephen Greenblatt)

I learned a lot from this book and was also quite entertained by it, which I guess is all you need to know; maybe I should have put that sentence last. Let's try this again:

I was worried when I started reading this book - the first page has our hero riding into town and notes that "any raw-boned yokel" could kill him by hitting him over the head with a club. Luckily, Greenblatt's overheated style calms down quickly as we start following our main character around as he hunts for lost ancient works in the libraries of Europe's monasteries. Eventually, this winding path takes the reader through a tour containing a look at bookworms (the book-eating "teeth of time"), the recovery of ancient books from Pompeii, a tremendously entertaining polemic against the Catholic church, and a through examination of Epicureanism. This could be a mess, but Greenblatt's able to work all of these elements into a cohesive whole that I both (checks first sentence) learned a lot from and was quite entertained by. Easily recommended for book nerds (cough), history nerds (cough, hack) and really anybody with even a passing interest in the material.

Grade: A-

"Ruled Britannia"

Ruled Britannia (Harry Turtledove)

This is an alternate history novel where the Spanish Armada succeeded, picking up ten years after England's defeat with Elizabeth imprisoned in the Tower of London and Phillip II on his deathbed. Don't let all those links scare you off - you don't need to know much beyond the very basic jist of what the Spanish Armada was to enjoy this book, although I don't think it's a surprise to say that history nerds will get much more out of it. The other audience I'd recommend the book for is Shakespeare fans, as the man himself is the book's main character, and in fact the entire book is written in his style. This may sound annoying, but Turtledove is able to pull it off for the most part, and surprisingly I never did get tired of people taking ten words what they could say in two (a random dialouge sample from page 130 about a guy excited to have a new play to read: "Dear Geoff's prompter and book-keeper. He hath before him a new play - so new, belike the ink's still damp. What'll he do? Plunge his beak into its liver, like the vulture with Prometheus. A cannon could sound beside him without his hearing't").
As it turns out, the book's real problem is its sheer length, coming in at a bloated 450 pages, at least 150 of which it could really stand to lose. To be fair, the book's setting does suggest itself as worthy of lengthy exploration, and I would be a little bit more forgiving if these pages were all just detailing the alternate history flavor of the book, but a fair chunk of these pages are eaten up by a pointless character and two particularly dumb plot twists late in the book. (Happily for the story, they basically cancel each other out, but a barrel of ink is spent on them needlessly.) In the end, this isn't an easy book to recommend to anybody but history buffs and Shakespeare fans, but speaking as a member of one of those demographics, I enjoyed it enough to earn a solid

Grade: B