Finally finished Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.

I guess my biggest criticisms/observations would be:

A. I think the title is actually pretty awful and unrepresentative of what the book is about, which seems petty but has actually colored a lot of how people discuss it.

B. It covers the Balkan-ness of the outbreak of the conflict incredibly well.

C. It claims to be comprehensive and I'm not sure it actually is. To my reading it seems to spend rather few of its pages in Germany, presumably because Clark is assuming his readers are familiar with that version of events so that he can focus on what's happening elsewhere, especially between Russia and France.

D. Some of his references to contemporary politics feel extremely forced, and will be dated within ten years. Presumably there will be some sort of second edition by then removing them, or else the author assumes that despite having written such an extensive book that these kinds of works are, by the very nature of the volume of scholarship on them, unlikely to last more than ten years anyways.

edit: phrasing.

Inspired by my use of it in my best of July user's choice post (thank you, kind voters) I decided to break with my usual policy and reread Foner's The Fiery Trial. I think I might have somehow not read the last chapter of it before. Either way, it was as hard going as my rereading usually is. I get frustrated seeing information I've read before in the same format and start thinking about how I'm wasting my time on it when I could be picking up new stuff. Doubly so when I've spent a lot of the last few years at least tangentially the in Lincolnland. I also read it right after Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. I like Eric Foner a lot as a historian and he's an above-average writer of academic prose, but two in a row was just too much even if they're both great books.

From that I've hopped over to Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone on the grounds that I really ought to read more books specifically about slavery than just David Brion Davis' Inhuman Bondage, however good it is. Berlin's got me hooked, though I know I'm going to be disappointed when he drops out circa 1819.

Finished reading Empire of Ice: The Rise and Fall of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, 1911-1926 by Craig H. Bowsley a while back, and finally have time to write up a review of it. It's a self-published book by Bowsley, who has also written about the development of ice hockey in British Columbia; that said, he is recognised amongst the hockey research community (that is a thing) as someone familiar with the topic, and this is the first definitive book on the PCHA, a rival league to the eastern hockey syndicates of the early 1900s.

It definitely shows that it is a self-published work, in that it could have used some good editing (the most glaring was he misspelled Sidney Crosby's name, which any hockey fan shouldn't do) and stylistic choices are a little odd at times, but overall its good. Each chapter chronicles one year of the league, with league business opening the chapter, followed by a short summary of league play and finishing with descriptions of the Stanley Cup challenges. Bowsley did a lot of research here, going into city and newspaper archives to chronicle the full history of the league, which has never been done before at this scope. He also includes a full appendix at the end which includes the stats of every PCHA player, as well as scoring summaries of each year, and other various stats that are relevant. I've always been interested in the PCHA, considering my own West Coast origins, and am glad to finally have been able to read a concise history of it, though a little editing would have helped.

What book(s) would you recommend on Ostrogothic Italy? Both politics and culture is interesting. I'm reading the works of Boethius and figured it would be great with a more detailed background knowledge.

What are some good books about the Gestapo?

Hello guys, recently I'm getting really interested in Marcus Junius Brutus and the motives behind his decisions, could you suggest any books to expand on him or even just on the liberators?

Apart from an historical perspective I would also like to read something from a political or moral perspective if you can suggest something. Yes, I know that it's not the job of the historians to pass moral judgments.

Apart from that, I always thought that Brutus last words, as told by Plutarch, were "O wretched Virtue, thou wert but a name, and yet I worshipped thee as real indeed; but now, it seems, thou were but fortune's slave." I haven't read Plutarch's "Parallel Lives" yet but I took a quick look and I can't find these words, where are they from? Are they from "Life of Caesar"?

Also, reading other Plutarch's works, do I need to keep something in mind? Should I read more recent authors? Thank you.

After my holiday I'm starting back into Peter Wilson's The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy. I've managed to remember pretty much all the salient details/people so the re-start is going pretty well. After taking a break for some light reading, though, the realization of how slow my progress is in this book really struck home. I'm going to try and pick up the pace a bit so that I'm not still reading this book come October.