What book are you reading?

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert Massie.

Very good book about an interesting person and time period...started off a little shaky but the great northern war part was excellent. Massie is of the 'don't judge' school which makes for some weird moments, but he gives you more than enough to judge for yourself.

[The Wizard]

Fisherking, if you want to hear why historians have a problem with an author like Morris, it's this exactly:

It is a first attempt at using history as a prediction tool.

History isn't a tool for predicting anything. It's history. It never repeats itself and the only thing you can learn from it is how not to repeat mistakes in past situations -- which will never occur again. It may provide interesting parallels but nothing else.

Don't get me wrong -- the contribution Morris wrote together with Walter Scheidel in the excellent volume they co-edited, The Dynamics of Ancient Empires, was great historical theory. But no historian today can seriously support what Morris essentially presents in the book you read: a reworked, Anglicized version of Fernand Braudel's famous histoire de la longue durée (in essence: the only important history is long-term history, and that is the history of the [constant] effect of geography on societies). So, Morris is hardly being original; he simply reworks a much older hypothesis for the consumption of a wider Anglophone audience unfamiliar with the works of the Annales school, of which Braudel was the dean.

In fact, anybody who's read Braudel's magnum opus, La Méditerranée, can tell you that even Braudel was not able to prove his much-cherished theory of geography determining long-term history. The vast majority of the first part of La Méditerranée (in which he describes the geographic factors affecting all Mediterranean societies, and thus the longue durée of his chosen subject) is economic and social rather than geographic, and thus by Braudel's own terminology not long but medium-term history. His book was seminal and the extent of his knowledge and ingenuity staggering, but still he could not make the longue durée believable. If Braudel couldn't do it, then I sincerely doubt Ian Morris can. Geographic determinism is simply not a viable school of thought.

[Mouzafphaerre]

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Finnegans Wake
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[Sasaki Kojiro]

Guadalcanal Diary: Richard Tragaskis. Compiled from his notes that he took as a war correspondent through the first 6 weeks or so of Guadalcanal. Definitely stays upbeat for the benefit of the wartime audience back home, but that's part of the charm. It's interesting to see the story told from the 1st person point of view of someone who has limited information about what's going on.

[The Wizard]

Reading a great Dutch translation of the Iliad by Patrick Lateur, set in the same hexameter as Homer used.

[Mouzafphaerre]

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Makes one want to learn some ORGish Dutch.

No, not now at any rate...
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[Sasaki Kojiro]

Storm of Steel: Ernst Junger. Fantastic WWI book, drawn from his diary, vivid descriptions of his experiences. I find it bizarre that I only heard of this book a few months ago while "all quiet on the western front" is everywhere even though it's a fictional novel written by someone who saw far less action than Junger.