I've started reading The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth Century Spain by Paul Preston (2012). I don't fully buy his justification for the title--not everything has to be a Holocaust for it to be a bad thing that happened in the 20^th century and I think it was a ploy to sell more books--but the rest of the book is simply excellent. Footnotes galore, reasoned arguments with highly specific evidence, minimized bias, and everything else you'd expect from an expert like Preston. The book is highly readable, but newcomers to the Spanish Civil War might be better served reading Preston's earlier book on the Spanish Civil War, or Beevor's. This isn't any fault of the text, it's just that the Spanish Civil War has a bewildering array of characters, parties, and ideologies within it. As with most other subjects, start with the survey books then delve into the specialist works.

I am reading this book slowly and carefully, and pausing to type into a digital document various passages that I know I am going to cite in the future. Previously, my statements on the various atrocities of the war have been sourced from the various survey works--Preston, Beevor, and Thomas--as well as José M. Sanchez. In the future, I will be relying heavily on The Spanish Holocaust. It will be a valuable companion to Sanchez's The Spanish Civil War as a Religious Tragedy, particularly in Preston's accounts of polarization and radicalization in the prewar period.

When I am finished, I'll post a full review. I don't expect to post anything other than a glowing recommendation. I'll answer any questions in the interim, though.

(As well as try to finally post a review of Soldiers: German POWs on Fighting, Killing, and Dying that I promised in an earlier thread. The Spanish Civil War distracted me recently, sorry!)

Is historical fiction okay here? Well whatever, it is now.

Ten for Dying by Eric Mayer and Mary Reed, due out March 4th, 2014.

This is the 10th book in the John the Lord Chamberlain series, starring a court eunuch named John who solves murder mysteries for Justinian I at the start of the Byzantine empire. Eunuchs and murder mysteries? All over that like white on rice. I have just been PLOWING through these this year. I started the first one in January, and then a couple of weeks ago I saw the 10th one was available for “professional readers” to read in advance and I was like ohshi yesss. And despite their high quality, and winning quite a few awards, these books are I think woefully under-read, the first book only has 15 reviews on Amazon!

Many of the books’ plots (and the personalities of the emperor and empress) are based on stories from The Secret History, so there is an interesting blend of history and fiction, by using these dubious-but-contemporary stories from the period. The writing style is what I call slow (that's not a bad word to me), the authors walk you through the mystery at their own pace, and you can’t “solve” them ahead of time. The mysteries are extremely twisty and complicated though, and with a fair amount of knifey-punchy action, for those who like that sort of thing.

My favorite aspect of the books is probably John’s inability to come to terms with himself as a eunuch, as he was an adult castrate. He HATES all the other court eunuchs, he sees them through a traditional anti-eunuch lens, that they are conniving, evil, fat creatures. He has no eunuch friends, he won’t even associate with them if he can help it, he hangs out exclusively with “normal” men. Narses (who was real) is actually one of his foils in the later books.

I was a little disappointed in the 10th book because the authors focused on a secondary character and had him do most of the action, with John toodling around in exile and solving it in his head, but there was completely awesome new female lead who more than made up for the lack of screentime for my favorite character. I also would strongly recommend not reading these out of order, they won’t make sense, don’t start with number 10!

On top of all this awesome, the authors are a husband-and-wife writing team, which is just adorabubbles. I can’t even cook dinner with my husband without micromanaging him, I don’t know how they manage to write books. And they have a website that is a long tall glass of the Internet from 1999. Textured marble and parchment style backgrounds. A weather widget for Constantinople. Who even knew Earthlink was still around? I friggen hate fancy websites, like J. K. Rowling’s sideways-scrolling loveletter to flash she is calling a website. This authors’ website on the other hand takes you back to a simpler time, when Internet pages were static, loaded quickly, and you could read a news article without either paywalls or racist scribblings at the bottom. Glorious. You should visit it even if you don’t read the books.

Anyway. Lots of fun if you like mysteries or historical fiction! The first book in ebook format is currently a dollar on Amazon.com if you want to splurge, or most likely available though your public library if you don’t, and the 10th book’s currently available for preorder at booksellers.

FCC disclaimer: My advance copy of the 10th book was free from the publisher because I’m a librarian, and we are very important and powerful people. I read the other 9 ones for free too because I have a public library card, but the FCC doesn’t care about that.

Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore; The Epic of Australia's Founding, which is a basic survey of early British Australia. It's a subject that I know very little about and as such I'm not qualified to judge the quality of Hughes' scholarship, but laying that aside, I will say that he's a brilliant writer and a pleasure to read.

Any users here feel confident discussing travel writing? I get the impression that historians are moving away from Mary Louise Pratt’s classic Imperial Eyes (and other post-colonialism studies of “contact zones”). I often see vague references to this trend in the historiography section of articles on travel writing. Does anyone know of any key books or articles written in the last 10-15 years that could help me learn more about this historiographic trend?

I'm currently working on an undergrad honors thesis on World War I, specifically the British decision to ally with France and Russia and intervene in the war. I seek to answer two interrelated questions: 1) did Britain intervene out of fear or Germany? 2) did Britain intervene out of fear of Russia? Unfortunately, given my limited language skills (I can muddle through French and Germany, but very slowly) and the sheer scope of this project, I'm in a bit over my head, but I think I'll ultimately find a way to bring everything together in a coherent way.

I finished re-reading Strachan's opus The First World War for the second time this week. I undoubtedly got more out of it than when I first read it as an undergrad.

On a different note, after reading The Map that Changed the World, about the construction of the world's first geologic map, and discussing it with some of my friends, I realized that today's overspecialization in the sciences means that many young scientists today DON'T understand where modern theories come from, and the ways in which scientific knowledge, like history, is constructed my humans, rather than handed down from on high. I feel like more scientific graduate programs should have a course on "how we got where we are today". This is especially true in geology where some parts of the discipline, like seismology and tectonics, have only really come into their own since the 1970s, whereas other disciplines like mineralogy have been around since the 1860s in essentially the same form they have today. In particular, old site surveys often contain essential information on how the landscape has been modified over time by human action, but you often cannot fully understand those monographs if you aren't conversant in the obsolete models and terminology they use.

Sorry for the rant.

Edit: forgot a an important word

I need a more up to date book on the Ulster Scots/Scotch Irish/ Presbyterian Irish in Pennsylvania during and after the French and Indian War. Patrick Griffin's People With No Name and Kevin Kenny's Peaceable Kingdom Lost are great, but I need something that focuses on backcountry/Presbyterian identity. I can't find anything that's not from the 1960s or some drummed up "Scotch Irish built 'Murica" type book.

I was pretty happy to find a copy of J.C.A Stagg's Mr. Madison's war at a reasonable price. The book is an excellent examination of the Madison administration's (often painful) conduct during the war, as well an in-depth examination behind Madison's thoughts regarding the plan for the war from the most informed writer of Madison history still living. It has been out of print for sometime and finding a copy that isn't overpriced has been very difficult.

Reading Ann Tlusty, The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany. Really terrific book, but annoying because I know I'll never be able to do such a great work of social history with such a depth of archival material...

Anyone have a suggestion for reading on runrig / infield and outfield farming? The two things I can find with my limited resources are from the 1950s and 1970s respectively and I'm pretty certain there MUST be something more recent.