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ulmont posted:I really like Salt and Cod, both by Mark Kurlansky: I enjoyed Salt until I got to chapter nine, which included a part on the Albigensians: Mark Kurlansky, pp153-4 posted:In the thirteenth century, a group of religious extremists based in the town of Albi and known as the Albigensians, launched a series of crusades to cleanse the region of "heretics". Asked how to recognise a heretic from a true believer, one Albigensian leader, according to legend, said "Kill them all. God knows his own." The chaos that ensued from this approach is known as the Albigensian Wars. In 1229 Louis IX[...] concluded a treaty to end the French campaign against the Albigensians. This is almost totally wrong. The Albigensians (aka Cathars) were religious extremists by today's standards, but not contemporary, and they were very widely sperad in souther France, northern Italy, and Germany. They didn't launch crusades to destry heretics; the French, at the Pope's behest, crusaded against and massacred them. The "Kill them all" quotation is attributed to Simon de Montfort, who was on the French side, exonerating a massacre by Crusaders. Finally, the warfare against the Cathars didn't end in 1229; it was accompanied by missionary work from the Cistercians and Dominicans, and went on until after 1250. In short, if a book is this wrong about something I know about, how can I trust it on things I don't know about? I can't recommend it at all. [Edit: fixed in the Kindle edition.] Safety Biscuits fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Jan 8, 2012 |
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Jan 5, 2012 21:17
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ulmont posted:Your quote, interestingly, is not the same in the version I just downloaded.  Sorry for the lame picture; I've edited my original comment to say that the Kindle edition is fixed. Mine is the 2003 Vintage paperback. However, my point about other unreliabilities I haven't noticed still stands. On to some history books I do like, though: Dictionary of English Down the Ages by Linda & Roger Flavell. It's a history of English organised by the years the words are first recorded; for instance, the contents page reads like "1512, Henry VIII founds the Royal Dockyard at Woolwich: page 142", which chapter links to other chapters on seafaring-related history and contains entries for "navy" and "deck". There's an index, though! The Medieval Machine by Jean Gimpel is exactly what it sounds like, and although it's dated (written in the 1970s) and overtly pessimistic, it's full of interesting stuff about how all Carthusian monasteries were (in theory) built in exactly the same way and skulduggery between watermill-owning companies on the Seine. The Timetables of History by Bernard Grun is a reference book; it's organised by year (or set of years, earlier on) and sphere of history, and detailswhat happened when. Endlessly interesting, but it's sadly very light on non-Western history and anything BC. Mark Girouard's Life in the English Country House is a history of how these houes developed from mediaeval forts and hunting lodges to Edwardian villas, showing how changes in society drove changes to the architecture as well. I thought it began a little slowly, but was fascinating towards the end. Finally, The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey & Danny Danziger is a history of tenth-century England organised around a (real) perpetual calendar surviving from around then.
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Jan 8, 2012 17:40
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withak posted:Mark Kurlansky's books on salt, codfish, and Basques (among other things) fall into this category. (That's Basques as in Spanish car-bombers, not ladies' undergarments.) If you read Salt be sure to get the Kindle version or hardcover because the paperback has a huge glaring mistake about the Albigensian Crusade. It's only a small thing, but the errors in the only subject I knew about wrecked my trust in the rest of the book. It was a real pity because it was a fascinating idea for a book and pretty well handled otherwise. You might also like Cocaine by Dominic Streatfield and maybe Oliver Sacks' and James Burke's books, although they're not exactly what you say you're looking for.
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Apr 23, 2012 00:01
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Get the Rough Guide and look at the bibliography section, they're good at that.
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Jun 20, 2013 22:36
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You can definitely get a reply in the A/T military history thread, but it might include "which languages do you read?"Arbite posted:Is there a good biography that focuses on Chiang Kai-Shek's time in Taiwan? All the ones I've looked at treat those 25 years as barely worth an epilogue. The last third of Jay Taylor's The Generalissimo, about 200pp, is about his time in Taiwan.
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Jan 25, 2020 15:29
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Neurosis posted:I'm reminded a goon in here wrote a book about a mercenary company involved in the Thirty Years' War that did integrate all the evidence in that kind of fashion, albeit he or she didn't have access to the original unit members - it was pretty good. I think you're thinking of HEY GUNS in the A/T military history thread. He's doing (did?) his PhD on them and plans to turn it into a book. Interesting posts.
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Jun 12, 2020 08:46
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PawParole posted:any good books on early human agriculture/ late Paleolithic life? How was After the Ice?
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Jun 23, 2020 15:23
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You can also discuss history books in the Book Barn discord: https://discord.gg/jgBDB25
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Jun 24, 2020 15:39
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Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, which isn't specifically about that, it;s about the arctic in general and how it influences our thoughts, but it touches on the people, obviously.
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Jun 25, 2020 15:36
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Tosk posted:Is the Durant couple's Story of Civilization still the best attempt to cover most of human history in a widely accessible format? I read the first two books when I was younger and always meant to continue but they were not the kind of reading I could easily commit to in university It's easy to criticise the Durants, but I don't think "most of human history" is an accessible subject at all; there's just too much stuff. Better to read a bunch of different things than a single attempt. Weavers, Scribes, and Kings sounds cool.
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Feb 21, 2024 16:46
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Ras Het posted:You can do lots with "all of human history" but you need a very specific angle. Like the Smil book about the total biomass of the Earth during the history of Homo sapiens That does sound cool, but it's not all of history any more than your height and weight are all of you.
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Feb 22, 2024 05:03
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