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Don't know of a single-volume history, but I know a couple of good ones dealing specifically with the Taiping Rebellion
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Jun 29, 2018 03:27
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I think most single volume histories start a little earlier than you’re looking for to cover the Qing Dynasty and China’s early dealings with the outside world. But there’s The Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spence that’s generally recommended though if I recall it could use an update (I think it stops in the 90s, at least the edition I read did). I’d also give a shout out to Restless Empire by Odd Arne Westad which covers the same period from the angle of China’s interactions with foreign countries. But since so much of China’s history in that period revolves around the actions of other countries anyway (Opium Wars, Unequal Treaties, WWII, etc etc) it’s a useful perspective to take.
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Jun 29, 2018 06:47
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Search for Modern China looks great. Any opinions on the Frank Dikötter trilogy that covers the reign of Mao? I know it has a controversial reputation. How about Mao The Unknown Story for a bio?
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Jun 29, 2018 18:49
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Search for Modern China looks great. I read Dikötters first two on the great leap forward and cultural revolution. I enjoyed them as someone who knows nothing of that period. I think the controversy is mostly around his high estimates of numbers of deaths but I'm not across the debate really.
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Jun 29, 2018 23:47
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EoinCannon posted:I read Dikötters first two on the great leap forward and cultural revolution. I enjoyed them as someone who knows nothing of that period. I think the controversy is mostly around his high estimates of numbers of deaths but I'm not across the debate really. Concurred; I've read all three and his sourcing is really goddamned strong, and explained in exhaustive detail where it cannot be. And they're about the best you can get in English that goes into deep detail on those three eras.
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Jul 1, 2018 02:25
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Cyrano4747 posted:Jarausch’s After Hitler is my go to single volume work on that. Thanks for finding my post and recommending that, I'll definitely be checking it out. I'm currently re-covering the earlier period with Bracher's The German Dictatorship. I was fairly clueless about the intellectual roots of national socialism so it's really interesting to read. With regards to China, Jonathan Fenby's Penguin History of Modern China is easy to read as a narrative. If you're at all into cultural history then Cho-yun Hsu's China: A New Cultural History was interesting to me, although I remember my lecturer saying that she wasn't fully on board with the idea of making it 'A Cultural History' (as in one, singular history). She did however write an oral history of the Great Famine, based on interviews she just about got away with doing a few years ago, called Forgotten Voices of Mao's Great Famine.
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Jul 1, 2018 18:31
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I've heard that Tokyo Vice was basically complete bullshit but haven't found any breakdowns as to how. Is there a reputable book on the Yakuza, assuming Tokyo Vice really isn't?
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Jul 4, 2018 03:15
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MeatwadIsGod posted:I've heard that Tokyo Vice was basically complete bullshit but haven't found any breakdowns as to how. Is there a reputable book on the Yakuza, assuming Tokyo Vice really isn't? If you don't mind Reddit, this is what dissuaded me from getting the book.
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Jul 4, 2018 04:49
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MeatwadIsGod posted:I've heard that Tokyo Vice was basically complete bullshit but haven't found any breakdowns as to how. Is there a reputable book on the Yakuza, assuming Tokyo Vice really isn't? I don't know what to make of the Vice controversy but I'm reading Yakuza by David E. Kaplan right now and it's pretty good.
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Jul 4, 2018 04:52
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I’m reading Europe by Norman Davies and he just gave a shoutout to Encyclopedia Britannica in the Preface.
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Jul 4, 2018 06:05
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Alec Eiffel posted:I’m reading Europe by Norman Davies and he just gave a shoutout to Encyclopedia Britannica in the Preface. maaaan he hosed up so much of the research in that book. Tony Judt (I think) wrote a devastating review, but I can't find it online.
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Jul 4, 2018 09:08
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Haha I got given a copy of The Path To Power and gently caress me I wanna give young Lyndon Johnson a wedgie but this book seems really good.
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Jul 4, 2018 15:45
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:maaaan he hosed up so much of the research in that book. Tony Judt (I think) wrote a devastating review, but I can't find it online. Should I abort mission? I just wanted a survey of the drat continent
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Jul 4, 2018 16:42
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algebra testes posted:Haha I got given a copy of The Path To Power and gently caress me I wanna give young Lyndon Johnson a wedgie but this book seems really good. The Caro books are absolutely loving incredible. I love them. quote:In an interview with The New York Review of Books in January 2018, Caro indicated he did not know when the book would be finished, mentioning anywhere from two to ten years.[17] quote:Robert Allan Caro 
HannibalBarca fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Jul 4, 2018 |
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Jul 4, 2018 17:03
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The Rick Perlstein history of the Trump presidency is gonna be great
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Jul 4, 2018 19:00
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:maaaan he hosed up so much of the research in that book. Tony Judt (I think) wrote a devastating review, but I can't find it online. The one which compares Davies to Mr Toad? That one is really great. It was pubished in the New Republic, which I don't think has an archive of its reviews online. You can find it reprinted in the last collection of his essays to be published called When the Facts Change.
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Jul 4, 2018 20:47
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Alec Eiffel posted:Should I abort mission? I just wanted a survey of the drat continent The guy has these very specific views about Eastern Europe which he promotes a lot throughout his work. He sympathises a lot with the plight of coutries within Russia's periphery, which is fine I guess but it led him to jump on a load of stuff which was published in the 1990s, including Suvorov's book Icebreaker which he cites in Europe, that basically tried to imply that Opertion Barbarossa was undertaken in order to thwart an imminent invasion of Germany which Stalin was planning. I wouldn't say that you shouldn't read Europe just because of this, just be mindful of this fact, and maybe check out the book Gorodetsky wrote debunking the claims, Grand Delusion.
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Jul 4, 2018 20:53
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Just found a letter Judt wrote to the LRB about the book. Summarises a lot of the problems with it I'd forgotten, including the fact that Davies seems to really suck at getting dates correct:https://www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n07/letters#letter5 posted:Neal Ascherson’s generous review of Norman Davies’s Europe: A History (LRB, 20 February) raises a number of troubling questions. The book, as even Ascherson acknowledges, is full of errors, yet these apparently in no way reduce its ‘intellectual achievement’. Really? There are eight errors on one page in Chapter 7. In Chapter 11 we learn that the Nazis supported Papen in 1932 (they didn’t); that General von Schleicher was in the Reichstag (he wasn’t); that the Germans occupied the Vichy Zone in 1943 (it was 1942); that 77,000 Belgians were sentenced for collaboration (the figure is 57,000); that ‘tens of thousands’ were killed in postwar France in ‘an orgy of retribution’ (the figure is 9000). Ascherson has provided examples of his own and so have other reviewers, expert in different periods covered by the book. Details, no doubt – but so many of them that misfortune begins to look like carelessness. In this sense, Davies’s book is indeed, in Ascherson’s words, ‘an epic work of the imagination’.
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Jul 4, 2018 20:57
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cloudchamber posted:The one which compares Davies to Mr Toad? That one is really great. It was pubished in the New Republic, which I don't think has an archive of its reviews online. You can find it reprinted in the last collection of his essays to be published called When the Facts Change. I read the piece of Davies in When the Facts Change too ("Crimes and Misdemeanors"), and yeah, it's hilariously devastating. Judt's view is essentially that Davies suffers from what Orwell would call transferred nationalism (although Judt doesn't explicitly name-drop Orwell) in favor of Poland. This leads Davies to, among other issues, write some borderline anti-Semitic things. Judt also notes that Davies is prone to getting dates and other facts wrong all over the place. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Jul 5, 2018 |
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Jul 5, 2018 01:32
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HannibalBarca posted:The Caro books are absolutely loving incredible. I love them. Lbj is rigging now his bumfuck nowhere college elections and this owns.
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Jul 7, 2018 01:19
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algebra testes posted:Lbj is rigging now his bumfuck nowhere college elections and this owns. Something he and Nixon had in common.
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Jul 7, 2018 04:13
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I really need something on the First and/or Second Scottish Wars for Independence. Dry and academic is fine.
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Jul 7, 2018 06:42
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Anyone have recommendations on the First Indochina War? Is Street Without Joy still the go to single volume or is there something more recent?
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Jul 8, 2018 02:06
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Commissar Canuck posted:Anyone have recommendations on the First Indochina War? Is Street Without Joy still the go to single volume or is there something more recent? Embers of War without a doubt. Came out in 2012 and won the Pulitzer.
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Jul 8, 2018 20:31
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Embers of War without a doubt. Came out in 2012 and won the Pulitzer. Excellent, thanks!
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Jul 9, 2018 12:46
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I'm looking for a good biography of Casanove and a good micro history about tea. Does anyone have reccomendations?
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Jul 15, 2018 00:48
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I've heard good things about Liquid Jade: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-312-33328-7 but have not yet had a chance to read it myself.
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Jul 15, 2018 00:53
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Strange Cares posted:I'm looking for a good biography of Casanove and a good micro history about tea. Does anyone have reccomendations? https://www.amazon.com/Casanova-Sed...ywords=Casanova its pretty good.
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Jul 15, 2018 05:44
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xcheopis posted:I've heard good things about Liquid Jade: I read it a few years ago and thought it was pretty good. Would also suggest "For All the Tea in China" which is a about the Scottish botanist Robert Fortune who went to China and stole the secret of tea production so the British could grow it in India.
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Jul 16, 2018 05:22
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Tangentially related, but what do people think about Dan Carlin and his hardcore history podcasts? I started listening to one and it seems rambly but decently interesting. Are they relatively historical accurate?
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Jul 20, 2018 03:01
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Quandary posted:Tangentially related, but what do people think about Dan Carlin and his hardcore history podcasts? I started listening to one and it seems rambly but decently interesting. Are they relatively historical accurate? I've listened to every episode, some many times, over the past several years. He's been doing them for years so like anything it's a mixed bag. He has some excellent multi-episode narrative series on the fall of the Roman republic, WWI, the Mongol empire, etc. And he has some interesting one-offs where he gets a bit more abstract. In every case he uses multiple sources including primary ones if they're available so it's more a question about the accuracy of his sources. The worst you can say about him is he tends to repeat concepts, ideas, and metaphors often and some people get turned off by his voice sounding a bit AM radio. I love Hardcore History and it's easily one of the best podcasts out there, history or otherwise.
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Jul 20, 2018 08:57
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Quandary posted:Tangentially related, but what do people think about Dan Carlin and his hardcore history podcasts? I started listening to one and it seems rambly but decently interesting. Are they relatively historical accurate? People with a deep and modern understanding of some of the subjects he covers tend to lay the critique that he is too attached to older interpretations of things. My main complaint is that he really spends too much time making his point about any given thing, but I guess at this point it has to be regarded as a feature, not a bug. There's the historical, informational, and educational podcast thread for in-depth disdain for his excessive fondness of boxing metaphors, if you like.
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Jul 20, 2018 12:42
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he also loves sensationalist sources of income dubious quality and will go on for 30 mins about the toll and the bodies piled up after every battle. also he loves military history and so he is going to talk about the most boring aspects of history
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Jul 20, 2018 21:21
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I have to be in the right mood for Carlin. His pod strikes me as the history lecture version of one of those YouTube instructional videos that spend fifteen minutes telling you what they’re going to do before you finally get to the ten seconds you need.
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Jul 20, 2018 22:00
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jagstag posted:he also loves sensationalist sources of income dubious quality and will go on for 30 mins about the toll and the bodies piled up after every battle. also he loves military history and so he is going to talk about the most boring aspects of history Sometimes it’s the right thing. Like the other poster, I have to be in the right mood. Hardcore history is told like a ghost story and that can be entertaining and the tone particularly suits his episodes on the eastern front of WW2 and his series on WW1. Also, avoid his common sense podcast. It’s mealy mouthed garbage.
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Jul 20, 2018 22:46
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Is it time to give Dan Carlin a kicking again? The way he tells August and September 1914 is absolutely 95% cribbed from The Guns of August (the rest is from Niall Ferguson). Which is a fine and readable book, but a lot of the things Tuchman presents as Pure and Unchallenged Fact for the sake of telling a good story have inevitably been shown not to be Pure and Unchallenged Fact. Then there's the delivery. Him sounding like one of those overly enthusiastic Youtube LPers reading out RPG dialogue for the personal accounts is one thing. The relentless portrayal of things as "NOW HERE ARE THE FRENCH AND THEY'RE SCREWED, THEY'RE REALLY SCREWED, UNBELIEVABLY SCREWED, EXCEPT, UNLESS, AND THEN, AND NOW THE GERMANS ARE SCREWED AND THE FRENCH ARE ON TOP, THE GERMANS ARE JUST HOPELESSLY SCREWED, THEY'RE A SHAMBLES, THEY'RE HOPELESS, THEY'RE USELESS, AND NOW, BUT THEN, THE FRENCH WEREN'T EXPECTING THAT, AND NOW ALL IS LOST FOR THE FRENCH, AND NOW THE GERMANS, AND NOW THE FRENCH" over and over and over again is another. (And then, of course, the French immediately disappear from the story the moment they push the Germans back to the Aisne, and don't reappear until Verdun.) He's a low-information gobshite.
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Jul 21, 2018 01:40
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I've seen recommendations for Hardcore History here and there for so long but I could never bring myself to listen to a person who use "Hardcore" sincerely. Glad to see that I am redeemed.
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Jul 21, 2018 02:00
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Boatswain posted:I've seen recommendations for Hardcore History here and there for so long but I could never bring myself to listen to a person who use "Hardcore" sincerely. Glad to see that I am redeemed. Hardcore is a great genre containing a lot of great bands my man
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Jul 21, 2018 03:55
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A human heart posted:Hardcore is a great genre containing a lot of great bands my man I don't know about that but I Respect Our Punks 
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Jul 21, 2018 04:11
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his room.e series was good though if you don't want to work through the rise and fall of the roman empire
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Jul 21, 2018 04:35
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