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This is definitely a broad range of Southeast Asia, but does anyone have any recommendations for any good histories (or even nonfiction) on Indonesia, Myanmar or Malaysia? I've gotten a hold of a copy of The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma by Thant Myint-U, which I plan on starting soon, and I've already found and read Indonesia, Etc., but besides coming across those I've come up short looking for good potential reads.
IBroughttheFunk fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 03:52
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I just finished The Future Is History and while I'm not sure it qualifies as history in the common sense of the word, I found it to be a really good look at Russia from the late 80's to current times. Basically it tracks the lives of several individuals in Russia whom the author knows as the USSR collapses and Russia goes from an aborted attempt at democracy and free markets to what we see today. As someone who knew very little of this period it has made me want to dig deeper.
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Jan 25, 2018 22:06
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Anyone have a recommendation for an especially good book on the Siege of Leningrad?
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Jan 26, 2018 18:37
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Looking for a good book on the Mexican-American War.
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Jan 27, 2018 04:13
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oompah posted:Anyone have a recommendation for an especially good book on the Siege of Leningrad? The 900 Days is excellent. I read it in college and have been meaning to reread it.
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Jan 27, 2018 05:43
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Any recommendations on Edward VIII, or the Abdication Crisis?
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Feb 6, 2018 01:28
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Alec Eiffel posted:Looking for a good book on the Mexican-American War. A Wicked War by Amy Greenberg is a good one.
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Feb 6, 2018 02:30
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Boomer The Cannon posted:Any recommendations on Edward VIII, or the Abdication Crisis? Philip Zeigler's King Edward VIII. By far the best book I've come across on Edward VIII. It doesn't entirely flesh out the family, but Zeigler is more evenhanded than anyone else in handling of Edward's magnetism against his propensity to be a shallow rear end. Rupert Godfrey's Letters from a Prince is interesting on the young Edward, drawing from letters he and Freda Dudley Ward wrote to one another. Edward's own "autobiography," A King's Story is severely lacking in details from the excerpts I've read. It was published in installments in several newspapers. All the histories I've skimmed of Wallis Simpson are garbage.
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Feb 6, 2018 03:06
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Is "The Republic For Which It Stands" comparable to "Reconstruction" by Foner? If so, which is recommended? Is the abridged version of Foner acceptable? Also thanks Fighting Trousers for the book rec! Alec Eiffel fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Feb 6, 2018 |
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Feb 6, 2018 06:34
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Curious about conflicts between Russia and Finland. Specifically just before and during WWII.
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Feb 6, 2018 18:29
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Alec Eiffel posted:Is "The Republic For Which It Stands" comparable to "Reconstruction" by Foner? If so, which is recommended? Is the abridged version of Foner acceptable? "The Republic For Which It Stands" covers Reconstruction, but only as part of a larger overview of the period. So it's also talking about Indian Wars, western expansion, Gilded Age politics, industrialization, etc all the way to 1896. Foner deals much more specifically with Southern Reconstruction. They're both recommended, honestly, it just depends on what you want to focus on.
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Feb 6, 2018 20:21
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Foner just reviewed it as well as the new Grant bio in the latest TLS, worth a look. I have them both, but working through What Hath God Wrought first (covering 1812 to 1848).
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Feb 7, 2018 19:09
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PatMarshall posted:What Hath God Wrought first (covering 1812 to 1848). I enjoyed that one a great deal. I also like “This Vast Southern Empire” covering around the same period.
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Feb 8, 2018 01:36
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Ron Jeremy posted:I enjoyed that one a great deal. I also like “This Vast Southern Empire” covering around the same period. Thirded, that was a great book. Been working through the entire series and just picked up The Republic For Which It Stands, which finally came out. Looking forward to a wider view over the Reconstruction Era than the very good but laser-focused Foner book had. And the Gilded Age stuff beyond that era. If it's as good as What Hath God Wrought, I'm in for a treat.
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Feb 9, 2018 19:40
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Though it's not a part of the Oxford American History series, another really good book for the antebellum through Reconstruction era is Brenda Wineapple's Ecstatic Nation.
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Feb 11, 2018 16:31
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Any suggestions for material on the Rurik Dynasty / pre-Romanov Russia? Maybe I'm just not using the right search terms but I'm having a hell of a time finding anything at all, at least on Amazon.
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Feb 12, 2018 22:19
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Beef Hardcheese posted:Any suggestions for material on the Rurik Dynasty / pre-Romanov Russia? Maybe I'm just not using the right search terms but I'm having a hell of a time finding anything at all, at least on Amazon. I'm quite fond of Valeria Kivelson's Cartographies of Tsardom which is a beautiful book about maps and land in Muscovite Russia, though maybe more academic than you want. Isabel de Madariaga's book on Ivan the Terrible is also quite good, though I haven't read the whole thing so your experience may vary based on how much you like reading about tsars murdering people.
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Feb 12, 2018 23:56
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Beef Hardcheese posted:Any suggestions for material on the Rurik Dynasty / pre-Romanov Russia? Maybe I'm just not using the right search terms but I'm having a hell of a time finding anything at all, at least on Amazon. “Kievan Rus” kicks back a few decent looking results for me. Just read the Primary Chronicle. Angels had a lot to do with things back then.
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Feb 13, 2018 00:43
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Recommend me your favorite books on Roman history, friends? Classics and moderns ok. I read The Twelve Caesars last year and loved it, though perhaps it's more gossip than actual history?
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Feb 13, 2018 04:40
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not SPQR
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Feb 13, 2018 04:57
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Is SPQR bad? I had a copy of the ebook I was thinking about reading after I finish what I’m currently on.
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Feb 13, 2018 05:45
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It's one of the better broad overview books I've read in a while and would be my first recommendation for that type of text. There was a bunch in there I'd never read about before and Mary Beard is an engaging author. E: Tacitus is the most fun of the Roman historians imo, he's a cynical rear end and doesn't like the Roman Empire much. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Feb 13, 2018 |
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Feb 13, 2018 05:53
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I don't t think it's very good as a broad overview if you're not already fairly well versed in the subject matter. She floats around chronologically and spends a lot of the book carrying out arguments with unnamed other scholars
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Feb 13, 2018 06:13
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my bony fealty posted:Recommend me your favorite books on Roman history, friends? Caesar and Christ by Will Durant Anything by Adrian Goldsworthy, but especially his Julius Caesar biography and In the Name of Rome
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Feb 14, 2018 04:22
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I really love the Landmark Julius Caesar It has really really great maps and annotations that really help bring context to Caesar's writings. Are you looking for a broad overview of Roman history or is there a particular time / subject you want to delve in to?
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Feb 16, 2018 19:33
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Are there any decent single-volume histories of the Vietnam War that aren't very militarily nitty-gritty? I struggled with Keegan's history of WWI because it got very into military strategy, and I'm more interested in social experiences. Is Fire in the Lake still the classic, or is there a better and more current book out there?
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Feb 25, 2018 04:58
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Pinball posted:Are there any decent single-volume histories of the Vietnam War that aren't very militarily nitty-gritty? I struggled with Keegan's history of WWI because it got very into military strategy, and I'm more interested in social experiences. Is Fire in the Lake still the classic, or is there a better and more current book out there? William S. Turley's The Second Indochina War was the textbook I used in college, and I recommend it a good overview of the war in a single short volume. Fire in the Lake is a classic, but I remember it feeling very orientalist and dated. Sure it won a bunch of awards, but it also came out before Saigon fell. If you're looking for a single volume about the American experience of the war, I really like A Bright and Shining, which wraps a study of the failure of the military effort in the personal tragedy of Army officer and later USAID adviser Lt. Col. John Paul Vann. If you're looking for a close academic study of the basic dilemmas of the war, War Comes to Long An focuses on one province, and how the government of South Vietnam utterly failed in the key elements of political legitimacy, personal security, and rural land reform. It's a 70s sociology dissertation, so it's not exactly a gripping read, but it gets to the core of the war more accurately than anything that involves arrows on a map or what Henry Kissinger was thinking on Tuesday. For a sense of the whole zeitgeist of the war, Michael Herr's Dispatches is the best of the Vietnam War related new journalism. And if you want a communist perspective, Trung Nhu Tang's A Vietcong Memoir is a fascinating look at how the war was "won" and what the price was.
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Feb 25, 2018 05:17
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I continue to swear by Robert Mann's A Grand Delusion as the ultimate history of the Vietnam War. If you saw the Ken Burns documentary, it's like that, but on steroids. It begins with WWII and traces the history of the Indochina region and how the French and then US became involved. It draws upon contemporary memoranda, diary entries, and declassified military analysis, and at times details developments on a day-by-day basis. It's heavy on the politics, but the war ultimately had very little to do with the military and was primarily about US politics and the policies that emanated from them. Mann's book is an exhaustive distillation of a myriad of primary sources and as such, I consider the book an amazing achievement of research and analysis. I didn't get much out of A Bright and Shining Lie and I thought McNamara's book was a waste of time (imho). The Herr book is pretty wild. It's basically Apocalypse Now: The Book, which really isn't much of a hot take since the movie borrows entire scenes from Dispatches. If you're trying to avoid the nitty-gritty of military battles, do not ready any of Bernard Fall's books. AARP LARPer fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Feb 25, 2018 |
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Feb 25, 2018 06:01
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I recently read Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg went to Vietnam for two years and participated in the decision-making process inside Washington for most of the war. Really compelling look at how mistakes get made and compounded, and everyone pays. Has anyone read his recent one, The Doomsday Machine?
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Feb 25, 2018 07:50
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:Has anyone read his recent one, The Doomsday Machine? seconding this. i have been tempted to read it. So i am doing my final term paper on the histography of richard nixon, mostly about his legacy and how it changed because of how the history was taught. so what are some of the landmark books about him. i already have all of the woodward and bernstein books as well as the 2 pearlstein books. i was just wondering what other landmark and academic books their are on nixon.
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Feb 25, 2018 21:48
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Dapper_Swindler posted:seconding this. i have been tempted to read it. There was a pretty good one-volume biography of Nixon out last year by a guy named Farrell. I enjoyed it; dunno what the scholarly consensus was though.
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Feb 26, 2018 00:24
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HannibalBarca posted:There was a pretty good one-volume biography of Nixon out last year by a guy named Farrell. I enjoyed it; dunno what the scholarly consensus was though. yeah thats on my list to pick up, honestly i am not sure how i am gonna pull it off but its to late to switch topics at this point. thanks for the recommend.
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Feb 26, 2018 02:30
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Meyers-Briggs Testicle posted:Has anyone read The Hundred Years War series by Jonathan Sumption? update: this series is good as hell, extremely dense, and avoids many purple prose pitfalls history authors can fall into i left the first book with an unreasonably intricate understanding of the early 1300's in france and england no other history comes close to this level of detail, the book goes decision by decision for every major player of the era, if there are things that aren't included in this book I highly doubt they exist. The bibliography is 47 pages long. the book is 600 pages, it's the first in a series of 5, the fourth one just released in 2015 coinciding with the 600th anniversary of agincourt it is fulfilling in the same way that 'the name of the rose' is fulfilling, you will have to reread sections over and over because of the density of the text. you will have to learn some basic french terminology. you will need a map of france near you at all times if you don't know where gascony or flanders is because of how frequently they're mentioned. this is the dark souls of historical nonfiction
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Feb 28, 2018 20:18
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I'm glad you've found joy in a serious history book. Sumption is also a judge on the supreme court, impressive time management on his part.
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Feb 28, 2018 20:32
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Meyers-Briggs Testicle posted:update: this series is good as hell, extremely dense, and avoids many purple prose pitfalls history authors can fall into I feel like this post is going to make me make a commitment I'm going to end up taking more seriously than my marriage vows. Goddamn.
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Mar 2, 2018 16:42
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What are some good books on the history of the Inuit People and/or other Arctic-dwelling groups?
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Mar 5, 2018 09:55
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:I recently read Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg went to Vietnam for two years and participated in the decision-making process inside Washington for most of the war. Really compelling look at how mistakes get made and compounded, and everyone pays. Has anyone read his recent one, The Doomsday Machine? I'm halfway through it, and the first half has been really good. Pretty stunning how bad our nuclear war strategy was in the first two decades after WW2. It does make me wonder why he waited so long to talk about this. According to him, when he secreted the Pentagon papers out of Rand he also took documents relating to nuclear planning, which he considered more important than those pertaining to Vietnam. But because of reasons I won't "spoil", he no longer has those.
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Mar 8, 2018 01:16
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How is his book any different than The Wizards of Armageddon?
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Mar 8, 2018 01:38
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No idea, since I've never read it. One of the critiques of the book is that Ellsberg doesn't really say anything new. But for someone like myself who was unfamiliar with this particular topic it is quite enlightening.
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Mar 8, 2018 23:48
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My audible credit came in. I need your guys' help! Recommend me a history book on anything. My only request is that the author and narrator are engaging to the layperson. I dont mind if its long and detailed, in fact, that's desired because I can get through a 20-30 hour behemoth in about a month's time(when I get my next credit) . I'm open to anything as long as its engaging, even the history of silverware and eating utensils.
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Mar 9, 2018 21:39
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