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House Louse posted: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. I really enjoyed that one. It was really short and a much quicker read than I thought it might be. I think my favorite moment was the jaw dropped that our days are still more or less named out of the Norse religion: Sun Day, Moon Day, (I forget Tuesday's original form), Woden's Day, Thor's Day, Frieg's Day & Saturn's Day. That's frigging awesome. I know that some more serious historians don't care for Will Durant, but for sheer readability and a sort of beautiful humanism, you can't beat him. Caesar & Christ is a fantastic book looking at Rome and the rise of Christianity. There's just a lot I love about Durant; he looks at modes and styles of art as part of history, which most historians don't, so we get, for instance, lengthy sections on all the great Roman poets. He covers the big events, but not before talking about how an average person (ie. the kind of person reading his book) would have lived in the period. He assumes that ancient histories are mostly accurate, unless there's a reason to think otherwise, which is a great contrast to the modern style of "let's catch an old history out on an egregious error of some kind" history writing. And he's just incredibly humanistic and compassionate; I remember a bit in Caesar and Christ where he's talking about a Caesar who had a ton of people executed and he says something along the lines of, "And while history doesn't explain his reasons, he probably had them." Which is frigging amazing. Durant is so refreshing, compared to a lot of history writing.
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Jan 29, 2012 21:32
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| # ¿ May 1, 2024 07:41 |
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