ITT We Recommend Favorite Books
Join Date: May 2004
Posts: 859
Everyone in the forum seems to have a very broad range of historical interest. I think it might be fun if we all list a few of our favorite historical works. Below are listed 3 of the books that have influenced me greatly. What are yours?
1. "The Civil War, A Narrative" by Shelby Foote ( a trilogy)
2. "The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone 1932-1940" by William Manchester
3. "Alexander Hamilton" by Ron Chernow
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 22,372
The Twelve Caesars, by Suetonius
Readings in the Classical Historians, edited by Michael Grant
Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician, by Anthony Everitt
The Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon
American Sphinx, by Joseph Ellis
1776, by David McCullouch
China: Its History and Culture, by W. Scott Morton and Charlton M. Lewis
The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman
Stillwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945, by Barbara Tuchman
Artists of the Renaissance, by Giorgio Vasari
The History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell
-Zeno
Last edited by Zeno; 05-14-2011 at 03:17 PM.
Join Date: Dec 2006
Posts: 2,804
Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 by Gail Bederman
Also, I'm a grad student in Sport Humanities with a specialty in Sport History if anyone wants suggestions in academic sport history works....
Join Date: Jan 2006
Posts: 11,558
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. Collapse is pretty good, too. Should probably throw in Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism in there, too, since it paved the way for GGS, yet Diamond mysteriously never cited it.
Most books by John Gray (the British intellectual historian, not the ******* who writes about relationship bull****): Straw Dogs, Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern, Black Mass, etc.
Join Date: Feb 2003
Posts: 13,093
Anything by McCullough and Chernow
Join Date: Dec 2008
Posts: 2,591
REQUEST: Any solid East/Southeast Asian histories are most appreciated. Preferably pre-colonial.
Probably word-for-word what I've written in another history book thread:
Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse by Jared Diamond.
A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin. (creating the modern Middle East during WWI, plus a lot of just WWI history to boot, minus the Western Front).
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Semi-fictional first-person account of WWI from a veteran. Fairly obvious, as are the Diamonds.
A Short History of the World by J.M. Roberts. General world history book. Not that short, but definitely not so long either. He also did History of the World, which is about 1000 pages. I guess Short is the abridged version.
A World History by William H. McNeill. Between Short and History by Roberts, it's not as fluidly written (downright difficult at times), yet it is well laid out and comes with many useful charts and such. I only got half-way through before having to finish (moved and it was a library book), but have spent the years since trying to find it in another library to finish it.
Righteous Victims by Benny Morris. Supposedly one of the most objective voices in an extremely politicized history, Morris discusses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the perspective that both are victims. Goes from the first Zionist settlers in the 19th century through to 2001 and the Second Intifada (iirc). Morris' other works are also fairly solid on this topic.
The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk. Not strictly a history book and not strictly objective (Fisk being heavily controversial), the book is still one of the greatest first-person accounts of history I've ever read. If you have any interest in how old-school journalists worked and what their lives were like and what the many Middle Eastern and Asian wars of the past 40 years were like on the ground, this is indispensable. Starts with Fisk's meeting with OBL, covers the Iranian Revolution, Iran-Iraq, the Persian Gulf War, Soviet-Afghanistan war, Algeria's independence war, and skips around Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, and elsewhere, iirc. He also wrote Pity the Nation over the Lebanese wars, which is highly recommended to me by others (but I couldn't go through another 1000 page history on Israel-Lebanon-Palestine to check it out).
