I have got hold of a copy of Fergus Kelly's Early Irish Farming. It would not be inaccurate to say that I seized it from the bookshelf with a girlish squeak of glee and did a little dance while I hugged it. I am, for context, nearly 40, male, bearded and quite fat. Neither shrieks nor little dances suit me. I do not care. EIF has been out of print for 16 years, and there is apparently a reprint this year. Amazon does not know about this, as far as the .co.uk version goes at least, and I consider having got it for €35 rather than the £239 they want for it to be rather good.

I have at this point read only the introduction and the first two sections about cattle and I have already learned so much. It is a glorious thing and I am still, some four days later, a little squee-ish about it. You can expect me to reference it a lot more now that I have my own copy.

I have been reading a number of works by Pierre Terjanian, curator of Arms and Armour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and formerly of the Philadelphia museum of art. In addition to a number of profiles he has written of early 16th century armours, I read his wonderful and comprehensive study of the armourers of Cologne. Cologne was one of the top armour-producing cities in the German Lands and in all of Europe, and Terjanian discusses its guild structure and the extent of its trade. The study underscores how diverse guild organization among medieval and early modern armourers was and how this affects they way that armour production was organized. It also contributes to the literature studying armour production outside of northern Italy an South/Central Germany - because so much surviving armour of identifiable origin is from these production areas, armouring and armour from other places has been neglected, and is treated as something of an afterthought as recently as Williams' 'The Knight and the Blast Furnace'. Combined with Capwell's work on the domestic English armouring trade, this is a really great exercise in broadening our understanding of the armour industry throughout Europe.

I've found a couple of reliable primary sources that refer to there being mental issues within the shipbuilding family I've been researching (Beckets of Salem). Both a father, mother, and half of the children are mentioned as having some form of mental malady. These range from "fits of derangement" to refusing to leave the house for years.

As both parents have symptoms, I lean towards either a communicable disease or a workplace hazard such as heavy metal toxicity. But honestly, just not sure. I have run into mention of another shipwright from farther up the coast having similar symptoms - which to me lends credit to the workplace hazard idea.

u/jschooltiger have you seen anything similar in your research?

Anyone know of a good book which gives an overview of the An Lushan rebellion? Or more generally of Chinese Central Asia during the Tang Dynasty?

My post in the Friday Free For All blew up a bit so I ended up reading more on contemporary Islamist extremist groups than I had intended in the past 24 hours or so. About 100 pages into Joby Warrick's Black Flags I can very much see why he won the Pulitzer over Will McCants very similar book. It's substantially better written, uses similar source materials on the Jihadi side, but contextualizes what was going on in US and allied (i.e. especially Jordanian) circles better than McCants does. I'd say it fits quite well as a kind of follow-on the other excellent Pullitzer winning terrorism pair of Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower and Steve Coll's Ghost Wars in terms of both readability (like the other two, it reads like a thriller novel) and the depth of the research.

After that I will finally finish the last 20 pages of The Sleepwalkers damnit. The last 20 pages have taken me longer to finish than the last several hundred. Work has been quite busy :(

On deck, a few I need to get through that I've already got open, but in posts this week I've also been going through Dimitri Gutas' Greek Thought, Arabic Culture about the translation movement in response to some questions we've got here. The translation movement is sort of one of those things that I know occurred, and can point to like "Oh yeah, the Islamic Golden Age, philosophy! Algebra! Translation movement!" But I know next to nothing about. Trying to rectify that, but there actually doesn't seem to be too too much on it. Probably doesn't help that it sounds like it involves a lot of tracking of manuscripts across several mutually exclusive languages and periods (i.e. Late Antique Byzantine Greek-->Abbasid Arabic--> and then hodgepodge of Ladino, medieval Byzantine Greek, Medieval Latin, and so on).

I am doing research on torture of Islamists in imprisonment. Do you know of books that discuss the history of Islamist leaders, terror group, such as Al-Baghdadi, Al-Zawahiri, Al-Zarqawi, and more?

I have been reading George Ostrogorsky's History of the Byzantine State, on the recommendation of a colleague. Really tremendous stuff. Painstaking analysis and discussion of sources, and very readable discussion of events themselves. Not normally my area of study. But I'm glad I took this little excursion into Byzantinism.

Can anyone recommend books on German civilian life during WWII?