I've been completely, possibly bodily absorbed in Tamim Ansary's Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes. As somebody whose Islamic history is very weak, it's been an incredibly enjoyable experience and Ansary is a great writer. That said, he appears to be a professional writer rather than a professional historian, so I was wondering if anybody knew of any criticisms of the book. He does have obvious biases, generally towards the Mongols and Timur, but since I don't know enough about the subject I don't know where else he's shading things. Can anybody comment? I also wouldn't mind hearing thoughts on his argument that it was (essentially) inflation caused by New World gold from Europeans that crippled the Ottoman Empire.

Just finished Guy Halsall's The Worlds of King Arthur, really enjoyed the snarky tone he used throughout the book and the stuff he covered is excellent, even though the book is partially aimed at the general public. His analysis of early sources like Gildas in particular is top-notch, and I even liked his somewhat controversial suggestions about the origins of the myth of King Arthur. The idea that the Roman usurper Magnus Maximus was the original inspiration for the British king Vortigern and likewise Ambrose of Milan for the mysterious Ambrosius Aurelianus for instance is ridiculously contrived, but I just love crazy theories like that. As he said in his conclusion, fact is often stranger than fiction!

This is more about history I'll be hearing than reading, but I think it could fit here given the context. In a turn of events that has caused considerable surprise for many, the hugely influential First World War historian Martin Middlebrook will be coming to Ottawa to deliver a lecture at the War Museum; I will be attending that next week, and I can't wait. [And in a spirit of fairness to this thread's intended purpose, this is all the more exciting to me because I really have been reading his work recently as I work on my chapter about the state of First World War historiography in the 1970s.]

Middlebrook was one of the leading figures in a new wave of First World War history-writing that began to come into its power in the 1970s. His The First Day on the Somme (1971) charted a bold new course for writing on this subject, being a collection primarily of oral histories to which he had added a framework of wider narrative -- and limited analysis, instead choosing to let the survivors of that day speak for themselves and have their words stand on their own. He collected testimony from over five hundred combat veterans of the Somme campaign during a time when the generation who fought the war was very swiftly beginning to die off; a great many of these oral histories might never have been recorded at all were it not for him.

The template this provided for books about the war has become almost the dominant one, at least on a popular level, with even new volumes breathlessly assuring the reader on their back cover matter that the book will provide a brand-new perspective on something in the words of those Who Were There. The latest printing of Lyn MacDonald's influential They Called it Passchendaele (1978), for example, which describes the 1917 campaign with the same method that Middlebrook used, insists that the book consequently "portrays events from the only point of view that really matters." Samuel Hynes has had a lot to say about this emphasis in his marvelous history of the soldier-memoir, The Soldiers' Tale (1997), particularly noting "the authority of ordinary men’s witness." This authority has in recent decades, it seems, become something of a cult.

In any event, Middlebrook was there at the start of all this, and in some ways was responsible for putting it in motion. He is nevertheless a fantastic writer and a very interesting character, and I am looking forward to this immensely.

Book buying for my two history classes this semester, The New American Nation and Colonialism in Latin America is now complete. I'd love to hear opinions on these books from anyone that's read them before, as I'm about to delve into them.

A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

The Minutemen and Their World by Robert Gross

Ambivalent Conquests by Inga Clendinnen

The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James

Colonial Lives by Richard Boyer

The Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano

Guys, I cannot be trusted.

My collection of pretty, pretty books grew this week with the acquisition of...

Restall's Seven Myths of Spanish Conquest because I couldn't help myself.

Etheridge's Mapping the Mississippian Shatterzone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South is a collection of essays about the protohistoric U.S. Southeast. European impact hit the Atlantic seaboard and the "shatterzone" motif is used to describe how the tentacles of the trade in deer skins and Indian slaves influenced the interior of the continent

White's The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 looks at conquest, assimilation, and persistence in the Midwest. This area is one of the holes in my knowledge base so I am particularly excited to get reading.

Finished Walter Laqueue's Europe in Our Time: A History, 1945-1992:

Laqueur's main thesis in the book is to answer the question of how Europe recovered from the destruction of the Second World War and why it went as it did. As he notes, it was widely believed in 1945 that it would take decades for the continent to recover, and even then it would never recover its position within the world.

To answer the question, Laqueur heavily involves economics; indeed it is the predominant aspect of the book. He details why certain political parties were able to come to power in the states of Western Europe (naturally focusing above all on the UK, France, Italy and West Germany). At the same time he examines the economics of the Communist Bloc, and why they were not able to keep up with the west.

The book was published in 1992 and though it mentions the August 1991 coup attempt in the USSR, it doesn't have much information past 1990. But that makes it a useful resource to gain an insight into the mood and historiography of the time towards post-war Europe. It also notes several trends that are still of concern today, notably the future of the EU (or EEC, as it was still known at the time), integration of the former communist states with the rest of Europe, immigration, and the effects of a recent recession.

As noted, it places a heavy focus on the four major states of Western Europe, while only briefly touching on the others (Scandinavia, Spain, Benelux, Austria and Switzerland), and while it does discuss Eastern Europe, details are, as noted, hard to come by and verify. As well it places almost an undue amount of focus on economics, with a lot of numbers and figures listed but not always placed in the right context. Other than that, it makes for an interesting read, especially with the benefit of two decades of hindsight in regards to the collapse of communism and the USSR. Because of when it was written, it is interesting to see an idea of what was expected with the USSR/Eastern Europe.

Two things that really stuck out about the immediate future would be that Yeltsin is only mentioned once, a passing note to "Boris Eltsin" being elected to the Congress of People's Deputies (note the alternative transliteration); obviously he had yet to come to the forefront of the end of the Soviet Union at that point. As well Laqueur talks about the impending breakup of Yugoslavia. He says that Serbia, led by Milosevic, is not happy with Slovenia and Croatia taking a more western-stance; but Laqueur is not sure what will happen, and says of Milosevic's intentions: "It is difficult to say what his real inspiration was; probably he was above all a Serbian nationalist." In the context of what happened throughout the 1990s, its a funny statement, as is the total lack of any mention of Bosnia; I do believe the word doesn't even show up in the book at all, though Kosovo and its Albanian minority are noted as a possible issue.

I've been reading Taming the Infinite a book on the history of mathematics by the mathematician Ian Stewart, and I've really not enjoyed it, for reasons I will explain. I usually like Ian Stewart, some of his mathematics books are really fun, but this one is not.

I'll start with one complaint that I won't really touch on much because this is a history subreddit, but the Mathematics in this book is nowhere near suitable for the intended audience. It's supposed to be a history of mathematics for "even the most number shy" (quote taken from the back of the book) yet the mathematics in this really isn't suitable for people like that, and would be very confusing for most people unless they've done further study in mathematics. Yet at that point, the rest of this book is incredibly simple, and those people would want a much better, more complex book on the subject. In the same way, the history in the book is incredibly simplified, giving reasonable biographies of the different Mathematicians, but other than that, just listing things that happened with no detail.

The lack of sources in the book is also very disturbing. It's impossible to verify any of the claims he makes in the book, and where he's coming to these conclusions from. There is a small list he made at the back of other books to read more about the history of mathematics in. Most of these books are much better than this one, including Boyer's A History of Mathematics which is my go to book to read about the subject.

Major historical problems in this. While he doesn't take as much of a "Dark Ages" approach to Science History than many people still believe, he still uses many of the same arguments and problems, taking an almost anti Catholic Church stance, and focusing the whole topic as a God vs Science conflict (theres even a chapter titled that) saying that the Catholic Church tried to stop all science, because it was destroying religious dogma. He talks about how the inquisition put Galileo under house arrest for his scientific views (he was put under house arrest, for different reasons) and that he was a lucky one, because the Inquisition burned others (not for science they didn't.) That entire chapter is shown to be false, and a much better read on the topic would be God's Philosophers by James Hannam (that has a different name outside the UK, I can't remember what it is.)

Other problems are the weird layout of the book, which isn't in chronological order and jumps around a lot, and the fact he seems to completely miss out on any mathematics that is outside of Europe, the Middle East as well as Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. This means almost nothing on places like China (there is a very brief section on Indian mathematics, but it's not much, and has nowhere near the focus as other places)

I didn't really expect much from the book, but it seems to fail at every goal it sets out to do, it's got quite a lot of bad history in it (I am tempted to do a proper write up on that subreddit about it) and the mathematics in it is incredibly difficult for a lay person anyway.

If anyone wants a list of books I'd recommend instead:

A History of Mathematics - Carl B. Boyer

The Exact Sciences in Antiquity - Otto Neugebauer

God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science - James Hannam

I have other recommendations if anyone wants them.