My best friend is a very strange guy. He says that liberal arts are a waste of time but is an economics major with a history minor. He loves to read military history and has a hard time realizing that other types of history are legitimate, and are completely inferior to military history.
I need to get him a Christmas gift, I want to buy him a book on a topic that is the complete opposite of what he would like. Something like on like Feminist Avant-Garde Artists and World War II. The more suggestions the better!
Thanks!
Here is one about avant-garde artists in World War II (though sadly it has nothing to do with Feminism). Though I actually like the book a lot and am reluctant to have it wasted on your friend who only likes the depressing parts of history, haha.
I'd get him Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, it's the micro-est of micro-studies examining the thoughts and intellectual milieu of a single northern Italian miller in the sixteenth-century who was put on trial by the inquisition for running around saying stuff like this on confession:
You might as well go confess to a tree
The best part is that it's principal figure, the miller Menocchio, thought his arguments were completely justified based upon a selection of texts he'd read. Part of Ginzburg's work is to identify what texts might have led to him saying rather the wonderful (and titular) phrase:
I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. The most holy majesty decreed that these should be God and the angels, and among that number of angels there was also God, he too having been created out of that mass at the same time, and he was named lord with four captains, Lucifer, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. That Lucifer sought to make himself lord equal to the king, who was the majesty of God, and for this arrogance God ordered him driven out of heaven with all his host and his company; and this God later created Adam and Eve and people in great number to take the places of the angels who had been expelled. And as this multitude did not follow God's commandments, he sent his Son, whom the Jews seized, and he was crucified.
It's a wonderful work of scholarship, written in an engaging and occasionally draw-dropping style and also very short (c.200 pp. incl. notes).