Historical Study Books - Page 12

The Russian Civil War 1918-22 (Essential Histories)

David Bullock

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Editorial Review:

The Russian Civil War was the most important event of its kind in the 20th century. It changed the lives of over half a billion people and dramatically shaped the political, human and economic geography of Europe, the Far East and Central Asia. Over a tempestuous four-year period the Communist Red Army and the loosely formed, anti-Bolshevist White Army battled in a war that would totally transform the vast Eurasian heartland and lead to Communist revolutions worldwide as well as the Cold War. David Bullock offers a fresh perspective on this conflict, examining the forces of both sides, the intervention of non-Russian forces, including American, Canadian, British, and Japanese troops, and the involvement of female soldiers and partisans.

The military story of massed infantry and cavalry actions, mechanized warfare with tanks, armored cars and trains, and air combat, all along rapidly shifting fronts, is told against the incredible backdrop of political and social revolution. It is an account that is interwoven with tragedy - 30 million people died during the Civil War - and the author skillfully places the battles in the context of human suffering as he explores the cruel sacrifice of a huge population on the altar of political power.

The absorbing text includes dramatic first-hand accounts, and is vividly illustrated with carefully selected previously unpublished photographs. This new insight into history's most significant civil war, which began 90 years ago, will be welcomed by all students of history seeking a compact account of the conflict that brought into being a new superpower - the USSR - and its threatening ideology.

The Colts' Baltimore: A City and Its Love Affair in the 1950s

Michael Olesker

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Editorial Review:

This is Michael Olesker's nostalgic reminiscence of 1958, the year the Baltimore Colts defeated the New York Giants in sudden-death overtime in a game that still grips the emotions of Baltimoreans. Olesker recaptures the city's love affair with the Colts in a series of thoughtful and colorful stories that give voice to such notable characters as Colts players Johnny Unitas and Art Donovan, politicians Tommy D'Alesandro and Jack Pollack, entertainers Buddy Deane and Royal Parker, sportscasters Chuck Thompson and Vince Bagli, and filmmaker John Waters.

The Colts' Baltimore also traces the changing cultural landscape of the city just entering an age of revolution -- a time when schools were being racially integrated, rock and roll played on the radio, and Baltimore was planning to renew the dilapidated downtown.

Revealing warm ties between Baltimore and its beloved Colts, Olesker's writing makes the events of 1958 seem like only yesterday.

Thomas Paine and the Promise of America

Harvey J. Kaye

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Look elsewhere for a comprehensive history. 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I was recently looking through the history shelves of a local book store when I saw the cover of this book staring at me. Recently I've been doing a lot more reading of history on the revolutionary generation and as a consequence I have been looking for biographies of the founders. Since Thomas Paine is someone I've long read and admired, and considering the positive reviews from Ellis and Hitchens on the back cover of this book, I decided I'd give it a try. Wrong move.

The first three or four chapters are a concise history of Paine, but Kaye hardly does the history any justice. He glosses over Paine's actual life and spends the last two thirds of the book giving a history of progressive and socialist movements in America. Apparently, in the eyes of Kaye, because Paine espoused liberal democratic views concerning government providing for the welfare of its citizens, no one but socialists and leftists can quote or admire him. How preposterous! Jefferson famously thought that the slaves should be free and realized the contradiction of fighting a revolution for liberty and keeping men in bondage, but he was a racist who thought blacks were inferior to whites and that the two races would never be able to coexist peacefully. None of that, though, prevents anyone from appreciating the Declaration of Independence any less and it certainly doesn't mean that only white supremacists and the Klu Klux Klan have the privilege of owning his legacy.

Anyone looking for a biography of Paine, or even an entertaining read concerning how his reputation has evolved since his lifetime, should stay away from this book.

Editorial Review:

Thomas Paine was one of the most remarkable political writers of the modern world and the greatest radical of a radical age. Through writings like Common Sense—and words such as “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,“ “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” and “These are the times that try men’s souls”—he not only turned America’s colonial rebellion into a revolutionary war but, as Harvey J. Kaye demonstrates, articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise.

The True History of Chocolate, Second Edition

Sophie D. Coe, Michael D. Coe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Find a More Trustworthy Source 2 out of 5 stars.
23 of 29 people found this review helpful.

The bulk of the research, and most of the first three chapters of this academic book, were written by Sophie Coe before her sudden death from cancer in 1993. Her husband, Michael, undertook to complete the book as a sort of monument to his wife. It is a shame that Sophie Coe didn't write the whole book.

Michael Coe has taken a book about the history of Theobroma cacao (the chocolate plant) and turned it into an apology for the Aztecs and a bitter diatribe against Spain and, more diffusely, against Europeans in general, and against those benighted slobs who eat chocolate with less than 70% cacao. In the process, he commits many gross errors in scholarship that are severe enough that the critical reader begins to distrust him.

I developed a fascination with the Aztec and the Maya as a very young child and remember reading books about them in the very early 1970's. Even then, European and American scholars recognized that Aztec human sacrifice -- even the sacrifice of little children to Tlaloc in the cornfields -- wasn't carried out in a mood of sadistic glee, but because according to Aztec theology the gods and the sun needed blood in order to live or the universe would be destroyed. Aztec society was highly literate and they were supreme bureacrats, and they themselves documented tens of thousands of human sacrifices. They also documented the extent that royalty had to let their own blood by pulling spiked cords through their lips, and the fact that wars were carried out for the sole purpose of capturing prisoners so that priests could sacrifice them. One does not need to minimize anything about Aztec theology in order to condemn the Spaniards for dehumanizing the Aztecs. And, at that same time that the Spaniards were dehumanizing the Aztecs, they were themselves torturing people for the sake of their eternal salvation, but torturing people nevertheless. Given the choice between the tools made available to perpetrators of the Inquisition, and an obsidian blade and a heart amputation, most readers would choose the more-rapid Aztec death over the brutal and miserable slow torture at the hands of the Inquisition. No question.

But even Coe acknowleges that the Aztecs were an imperialist culture engaged in aggressive war for the sake of territory, victims for human sacrifice, slaves, T. cacao, and other wares.

This is an argument that does not need to be had. And if anyone is interested in a truly scholarly work about pre-Columbian Meso-American life, then read 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. This new work, which contains scholarship unavailable to the Coes, shows that the population of the New World exceeded that of contemporary Europe, and provides clear-eyed descriptions based on the archaeological record, and based on new DNA research, of life during that time.

But the purpose of the Coe's book, ostensibly, is to give the reader the history of chocolate, not to go into long diatribes against Spaniards, or to make comments like this "Our almost exclusive devotion to taking our chocolate 'straight' is singularly unimaginative." Um, well, we don't. We eat chocolate on top of every sweet thing known to man, mix it with our coffee, and we even brew it in our beer. We consume it in solid, powdered and liquid form. We just don't mix it with chili, or drink it cold mixed with cornmeal. This hardly translates into "unimaginative" cooking, any more than the Aztecs are unimaginative because they only took their chocolate in liquid form.

Coe's defensiveness concerning the Aztecs causes him to discount eyewitness accounts by Aztecs and Spaniards alike. Apparently, the Aztecs felt that T. cacao was an intoxicant and an aphrodisiac. The Coes vehemently disagreed that it was, and vehemently disagreed that the Aztec king would ever need an aphrodisiac, and besides, the Spaniards all were constipated from their bad diet. Yes, it really does get that silly.

In fact, it gets so silly, that Michael Coe by the end of the book is defending the Marquis de Sade as an epicure who's getting picked on by the authorities. Yes, chocolate is circuitously involved, but anyone who quotes the Marquis de Sade as an authority on pleasure needs to have his head examined. Anyone who's read 120 Days of Sodom knows why.

The Coes can't be faulted for their ignorance of medical and pharmacological research that had yet to take place as of the writing of their book, but current research shows that chocolate has a direct impact on neurotransmitters in the brain that affect the sense of well-being and of ones that might put the consumer in a more amorous frame of mind. And T. cacao is a mild stimulant. The medical reality, though, could be said to be irrelevant. The Aztecs served chocolate to the bride and groom at wedding ceremonies. The Aztecs associated chocolate with life-giving blood. To the Aztecs, chocolate was associated with sex. It constitutes the worst form of cultural imperialism to suggest that the Aztecs didn't know what they were talking about, and discount eyewitnesses who emphasized Aztec usage of chocolate consistent with this Aztec cultural view. The Aztecs don't need the Coes to tell them what their chocolate really means to them, because the Aztecs explicitly stated it in their liturgy, poetry, sculpture, commerce and ceremony. And the Coes might want to reconsider the accuracy of the Aztec position since our culture also considered chocolate to be an aphrodisiac prior to the recent scientific discoveries, which is why American men give it to women on Valentine's Day.

The Coes also make much of the fact that, they say, chocolate can't be an intoxicant, so the Aztecs are a bunch of puritans when they say that it is. We have already discussed that T. cacao causes an altered state of consciousness by affecting neurotransmitters. In our world, to be intoxicated one's motor skills must be affected, as when one consumes alcohol or marijuana, or one's judgment must become completely obliterated, as when one consumes cocaine, hallucinogens, or crystal meth. But from this we do not conclude that all those Aztecs are making it all up; a reliable scholar does not discard contemporary accounts and contemporary usage, but instead concludes that the Aztec concept of "intoxication" does not coincide with the Western concept. One concludes that the Aztec usage of the word is more nuanced than ours.

Coe discounts one eyewitness who fails to agree with him on the subject of when Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin consumed chocolate at a "colossal event" by saying that "it should be kept in mind that these are the recollections of an old man in his eighties." And so Coe dehumanizes an eyewitness based on his age for the simple sin of failing to agree with him. Coe's basis for disagreeing with the eyewitness is that chocolate can't possibly be an aphrodisiac and how dare anyone suggest that Motecuhzoma needs an aphrodisiac just because he has a large harem.

Coe's huffiness affects his scholarship later when discussing the origin of the word "chocolate." He takes up the Maya verb "chukola'j" which means "to drink chocolate together." But he is mystified that Europeans did away with the Nahuatl term for chocolate: cacahuatl. Only at the very end of a long monologue does he grasp the most obvious point: No speaker of any Romance language wants to drink a runny brown substance called "caca"-anything. The name changed from cacahuatl for the same reason that we no longer refer to that long-eared furry animal that hops and eats carrots as a "coney" -- and coney rhymes with "money." We call it a "rabbit." But we still keep the association with coney, as when we talk about a woman of ill-repute performing the coital act with the frequency of a rabbit, and when Emma's father tells newly-widowed Charles Bovary, "We'll have you shoot a rabbit in the fields to help you get over your sorrow."

The Coes' failure to recognize the emotional and social impact of language, and the sense that they know best, and that the Aztecs must stop their silliness in thinking they needed an aphrodisiac, and the Europeans must stop being so benighted, is part of a whole unappetizing and academically-deficient package.

Ironically, the book ends with a snobby list of select chocolates that we are told meets the Coes' specifications as true chocolate -- all of which contain at least 70% cocoa. This list is entirely inadequate. There are terms of art for discussing the taste of chocolate, just as their are for wine, beer, coffee and tea. A reader who wants to be told what certain chocolates taste like could easily find more lively and comprehensive guides that teach the reader what to look for in the finest chocolates, and those terms of art, just as such guides are available for connoisseurs of wine, beer, coffee or tea.

I am grateful for the picture of what a cacao pod looks like on the tree and split in half. I have been walking around all my life with a totally erroneous picture in my head.

But other than that, the Coes' biases, their stated refusal to consider eyewitness accounts and other scholarship if it does not conform to their pre-established bias, the lack of good humor, the hateful tone, and the prescription for Valrhona chocolate or else you are a benighted slob, all make for unappetizing reading.

I can't help but think there is more trustworthy scholarship out there, and more enjoyable sources to consider when reading about chocolate.

Editorial Review:

The Coes, both anthropologists with a culinary bent, delve deeply into the history of their mouth-watering subject. The material on ancient cultures is particularly fascinating--did you know that the Maya used unsweetened liquid chocolate as currency? And in a chapter called "Chocolate for the Masses," they detail the modernization of chocolate manufacture, which has allowed more than 25 million Hershey's Kisses to roll off the conveyor belt each day.

The Art of Memory

Frances A. Yates

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

An excellent exploration of a forgotten art 4 out of 5 stars.
40 of 41 people found this review helpful.

If you are fascinated by history or by scholarship throughout recorded time, you should enjoy this book. Francis Yates has created a detailed examination of memory techniques and their evolution over the course of generations. Beginning in ancient Greece and continuing through the Middle Ages, Yates shows how the art of remembering began as a sort of parlor trick and developed into an important skill in both religion and the occult. The influence from both individuals and cultures is described in a scholarly (yet not annoyingly so) way. While this book is not for everyone, its intended audience should be delighted.
NOTE: This book is not a "how-to" manual for memory. It provides only a very general description of memory methods and is instead an exploration of the history of the art.
An excellent companion piece to this book is _The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci_. Both books were listed in the acknowledgements of Thomas Harris' _Hannibal_.

Editorial Review:

One of Modern Library's 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century

In this classic study of how people learned to retain vast stores of knowledge before the invention of the printed page, Frances A. Yates traces the art of memory from its treatment by Greek orators, through its Gothic transformations in the Middle Ages, to the occult forms it took in the Renaissance, and finally to its use in the seventeenth century. This book, the first to relate the art of memory to the history of culture as a whole, was revolutionary when it first appeared and continues to mesmerize readers with its lucid and revelatory insights.

The lost realms: Book IV of the Earth Chronicles (The Earth Chronicles)

Zecharia Sitchin

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Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the sixteenth century, Spanish conquerors came to the New World in search of El Dorado, the fabled city of gold. Instead, they encountered inexplicable phenomena that have puzzled scholars and historians ever since: massive stone edifices constructed in the Earth's most inaccessible regions . . . great monuments forged with impossible skill and unknown tools . . . intricate carvings describing events and places half a world away.

Who were the bearded "gods of the golden wand" who had brought civilization to the Americas millennia before Columbus? Who were the giants whose sculpted stone heads in Mesoamerica still mystify to this day?

In this remarkably researched fourth volume of The Earth Chronicles, author and explorer Zecharia Sitchin uncovers the long-hidden secrets of the lost New World civilizations of the Olmecs, Aztecs, Mayas and Incas, and links the conquistadors' quest for El Dorado to the extraterrestrials who searched there for gold long before.

The History of the Snowman

Bob Eckstein

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Who made the first snowman? Who first came up with the idea of placing snowballs on top of each other, and who decided they would use a carrot for a nose? Most puzzling of all: How can this mystery ever be solved, with all the evidence long since melted? The snowman appears everywhere on practically everything -- from knickknacks to greeting cards to seasonal sweaters we plan to return. Whenever we see big snowballs our first impulse is to deck them out with a top hat. Humorist and writer Bob Eckstein has long been fascinated by this ubiquitous symbol of wintertime fun -- and finally, for the first time, one of the world's most popular icons gets his due. A thoroughly entertaining exploration, The History of the Snowman travels back in time to shed light on the snowman's enigmatic past -- from the present day, in which the snowman reigns as the King of Kitsch, to the Dark Ages, with the creation of the very first snowman. Eckstein's curiosity began playfully enough, but soon snowballed into a (mostly) earnest quest of chasing Frosty around the world, into museums and libraries, and seeking out the advice of leading historians and scholars. The result is a riveting history that reaches back through centuries and across cultures -- sweeping from fifteenth-century Italian snowballs to eighteenth-century Russian ice sculptures to the regrettable "white-trash years" (1975-2000). The snowman is not just part of our childhood memories, but is an integral part of our world culture, appearing -- much like a frozen Forrest Gump -- alongside dignitaries and celebrities during momentous events. Again and again, the snowman pops up in rare prints, paintings, early movies, advertising and, over the past century, in every art form imaginable. And the jolly snowman -- ostensibly as pure as the driven snow -- also harbors a dark past full of political intrigue, sex, and violence. With more than two hundred illustrations and a special section of the best snowman cartoons, The History of the Snowman is a truly original winter classic -- smart, surprisingly enlightening, and quite simply the coolest book ever.

The Discoverers

Daniel J. Boorstin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 80 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Perhaps the greatest book by one of our greatest historians, The Discoverers is a volume of sweeping range and majestic interpretation. To call it a history of science is an understatement; this is the story of how humankind has come to know the world, however incompletely ("the eternal mystery of the world," Einstein once said, "is its comprehensibility"). Daniel J. Boorstin first describes the liberating concept of time--"the first grand discovery"--and continues through the age of exploration and the advent of the natural and social sciences. The approach is idiosyncratic, with Boorstin lingering over particular figures and accomplishments rather than rushing on to the next set of names and dates. It's also primarily Western, although Boorstin does ask (and answer) several interesting questions: Why didn't the Chinese "discover" Europe and America? Why didn't the Arabs circumnavigate the planet? His thesis about discovery ultimately turns on what he calls "illusions of knowledge." If we think we know something, then we face an obstacle to innovation. The great discoverers, Boorstin shows, dispel the illusions and reveal something new about the world.

Although The Discoverers easily stands on its own, it is technically the first entry in a trilogy that also includes The Creators and The Seekers. An outstanding book--one of the best works of history to be found anywhere. --John J. Miller

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol

Iain Gately

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A spirited look at the history of alcohol from the dawn of civilization to the twenty first century

For better or worse, alcohol has helped shape our civilization. Throughout history, it has been consumed not just to quench our thirsts or nourish our bodies but also for cultural reasons. It has been associated since antiquity with celebration, creativity, friendship, and danger, for every drinking culture has acknowledged it possesses a dark side.

In Drink, Iain Gately traces the course of humanity’s 10,000 year old love affair with the substance which has been dubbed “the cause of—and solution to—all of life’s problems.” Along the way he scrutinises the drinking habits of presidents, prophets, and barbarian hordes, and features drinkers as diverse as Homer, Hemmingway, Shakespeare, Al Capone, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Covering matters as varied as bacchanals in Imperial Rome, the gin craze in 17th century London, the rise and fall of the temperance movement, and drunk driving, Drink details the benefits and burdens alcohol has conveyed to the societies in which it is consumed. Gately’s lively and provocative style brings to life the controversies, past and present, that have raged over alcohol, and uses the authentic voices of drinkers and their detractors to explode myths and reveal truths about this most equivocal of fluids.

Drink further documents the contribution of alcohol to the birth and growth of the United States, taking in the war of Independence, the Pennsylvania Whiskey revolt, the slave trade, and the failed experiment of National Prohibition. Finally, it provides a history of the world’s best loved drinks. Enthusiasts of craft brews and fine wines will discover the origins of their favorite tipples, and what they have in common with Greek philosophers and medieval princes every time they raise a glass.

A rollicking tour through humanity’s love affair with alcohol, Drink is an intoxicating history of civilization

City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

William Dalrymple

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 44 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A great book for insight on multi-layered cultures of Delhi 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I was born and brought up in Delhi, and lived there for 21 years of my life, after which I emigrated to the United States. This book made me feel that how oblivious many of us 'locals' are, of the many riches and insights that my home city has to offer.

William Dalrymple peels the multilayered culture of the historical city of Delhi - seven times the capital of empires - ruined and rebuilt again. He spans from the Punjabi immigrants that've filled the newer parts of economically booming Delhi sice the partition of India in 1947; to the more historic but now decrepit old Delhi - where the legendary age old 'Persian' customs such as the 'Kabootar' (Pegion) fights, the 'Chor' (Thief) Bazaars and the mysterious 'Hakims' (Doctors practicing an old school of medicine) are unquestioned parts of the daily lives of many. Dalrymple also describes the curious and unique collision of history leading to the current day fate of the Indian Hijras (Eunuchs), who ring the door bells of apartments of Delhi's denizens, in the old city and the new, on any kind of festivity. He describes the fascinating history and architecture of the tomb of Himayun and Hazrat Nizam-ud-din, the charming old 'Quawaalis' (musical forums) still alive there, and many other monuments that I visited umpteen times as a kid, the 'Sadhus', an ancient culture intact with flavors... the list is endless. Somehow, I missed making the connections, and could see the beauty of the entire kaliedoscope when I read this book. I find my visits to Delhi so much more fascinating. One thing that the readers must be made aware though is the overt focus on history of Mughal (Persian) Delhi - which is for a reason - that all the pre-Mughal monuments were destroyed. The Delhi that exists is newer than the spirit of the city really is.

Since I read this book I always try to find such books on the cities I've visited. A strong recommend for anyone visiting Delhi -- you can choose to be put off by the seeming boorishness of the existing 'New' Delhi, or scratch beneath the surface and discover magic!

Editorial Review:

Sparkling with irrepressible wit, City of Djinns peels back the layers of Delhi's centuries-old history, revealing an extraordinary array of characters along the way-from eunuchs to descendants of great Moguls. With refreshingly open-minded curiosity, William Dalrymple explores the seven "dead" cities of Delhi as well as the eighth city-today's Delhi. Underlying his quest is the legend of the djinns, fire-formed spirits that are said to assure the city's Phoenix-like regeneration no matter how many times it is destroyed. Entertaining, fascinating, and informative, City of Djinns is an irresistible blend of research and adventure.