Have You Caught Up with History?

Summer Reading 4

Roman bust of Herodotus, “Father of History” or “Father of Lies”

A decade or so ago, a young woman—an international student, I believe—who had read Père Goriot in my Freshman Writing Seminar, “How to Do Things with Words,” came to see me the following semester to thank me for showing her how wonderful it is to read books, and to proclaim that she was going to read all of Balzac before her twenty-sixth birthday. She knew there were ninety-one novels still ahead of her, and I knew (but didn’t say) that they weren’t all as riveting as Goriot, but I said it was a great idea. I meant it, too.

Treacherously, I now have forgotten just about everything about this lovely person except the happy gleam in her eye. I haven’t heard from her since that day, and the deadline has long passed, but I am still hoping for an update.

I was myself an eager young soul at her age. During the long, hot summer after my freshman year in college, at my air-unconditioned parental home in Providence, I ploughed enthusiastically through the eleven volumes of Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization. Few young people nowadays will have faced that sheer, red-orange cliff of tomes, which took the Durants forty years to erect. In their time, however, their efforts were rewarded with enormous commercial success, a Pulitzer Prize, and, eventually, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The Story of Civilization is an intelligent but plodding affair, and while I have seen many references to it in print, I never saw anyone claim there was anything exciting about it. Its greatest charm was probably its simple monumentality. Like Everest, it was there.

Still, it was meant for a popular audience which might never have thought of tackling Everest if the Durants hadn’t pointed it out to them and made it seem accessible on a budget. Like the Book-of-the-Month Club, where they were perennially featured, the Durants were devoted to the democratic idea that non-academic readers had enormous energy to invest in their leisure-time education and could enjoy the experience of learning.

I am not going to segue into the standard lament that nobody would launch a project like that anymore, that book-reading is dead and democracy dying with it. As Doris Day said (or sang), “The future’s not ours to see,” and I just learned from Wikipedia that the Book-of-the-Month Club has had a resurgence. What I want to say about Will and Ariel, though, is that they had a conviction I myself still believe in—that if you want to understand human life and history, you have to take account of as much of it as possible. You can’t confine yourself to literature or science or religion or philosophy. Will Durant had been a philosopher—an enthusiast, as I remember, of Spinoza—and he was particularly eager to integrate political and social events with the history of thought. That was a good thing.

It was George Mallory, of course, who sought to climb Everest “Because it’s there.” I don’t think the Everest effect is entirely passé. I remember being surprised not so long ago that so many students had taken up David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for obviously Mallorian reasons. I have often told my students that it would be a great idea to supplement their education by reading a one-volume world-history book—not a sprint like Harari’s Sapiens (a weak performance) but a big-picture, one-volume venture like J. M. Roberts and O. A. Westad’s History of the World, now in its sixth edition. As far as I know, however, nobody has taken me up on this moderately Alpine challenge.

But this is supposed to be a leisurely summer reading list, and here I go proposing Alpine feats. The following are history books that I read with pleasure and instruction at various times during my own history. Some are mere adventures. Some defend a grand thesis. Many but not all are on the grim side. As summer reading, I suspect most of them hold up pretty well. (Biographies I have left for another time.)

Lest you think I’ve just stuck in every book I could think of, note that I didn’t include any of the Annales historians (Fernand Braudel, most glaringly) because I find their glut of information impossible to assimilate. I have avoided grand, indigestible systematizers like Toynbee and Spengler. Some boutique favorites like The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg and The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis didn’t impress me, though as for the latter, I enjoyed the movie.

Like everyone else, I find Michel Foucault’s writing mesmerizing but he’s too fanciful to get an imprimatur. If I had written a sequel to my book Paranoia and Modernity, Foucault would have been worth a chapter. As for his fellow intellectual historians, I’ve scanted most of them as fitter for another season. As a result, fine works like Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of the Enlightenment and Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self don’t appear.

I have left out some great books like The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha, Richard Overy’s Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, which I have written about here recently, and Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, my favorite book of recent years. Again, they are better for winter reading than for summer, and not too close to bedtime, I might add.

One book may seem ill-placed, Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art, but it is too delightful a treasure to be left out, and I am not enough of a connoisseur of art history to give it company in a separate list.

I thought of grouping these books by topic, but no grouping seemed to recommend itself. Finally, it seemed better just to let them play alphabetically upon your browsing fancy.

Henry Adams, Mont St-Michel and Chartres
Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets 
Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death
Daniel Boorstin, The Americans, vols. 2 & 3
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious
Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory
Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America
John Keegan, The Face of Battle
John Keegan, The Mask of Command
Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Everest Disaster
T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Identity, 1880-1920.
Jill Lepore, King Philip’s War and the Making of American Identity 
Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the Incas
Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus
James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era 
Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince (about Heian period Japan)
Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence
Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich
Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
Carl Schorscke, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture
Hampton Sides, The Wide, Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook 
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man 
Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849
Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why: The Story of the Fatal Charge of the Light Brigade
Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

One word more. I would be remiss if I did not mention that my true favorite historians are of an older vintage, Herodotus and Thucydides above all, and Plutarchh is unavoidable. Also, for sheer historical storytelling, no one, in my view, can best Livy, Macaulay, or Parkman, whatever else their flaws might be.

Herodotus, The Histories
Livy, The History of Rome
Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England 
Francis Parkman, France and England in North America
Plutarch, Parallel Lives (especially the Life of Lycurgus)
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War