@sallysmum I have not- haven’t even heard of it (pitfalls of being an Americanist surrounded by other Americanists)! That sounds really interesting though- adding to the list
@teriwtt thanks for the head’s up. I felt the same about reading Emperor of all Maladies. We were originally going to assign it for an undergrad class that I was supposed to co-teach this semester and we ended up realizing that students were just going to balk by looking at it…
I was never one for any kind of maritime book but I read The Slave Ship a month or so ago and it was absolutely fascinating. It wasn’t a maritime history in the traditional sense but it was still very much a history of oceanic travel. (Also a recommendation for anyone interested in any kind of history of slavery.)
Boys in the Boat - Daniel Brown
Dead Wake - Erik Larson
Even Silence Has An End - Ingrid Betancourt
Eye of the Albatross - Carl Safina
Fu Go - Ross Coen
Nothing to Envy - Barbara Demick
The Strangest Man - Graham Farmelo
The Ghost Map - Steven Johnson
I find it hard to slog through non fiction but here are some slightly older titles that were very compelling reads for me.
Krakatoa- the day the world exploded by Simon Winchester. He is just incredibly thorough.
Conscience and Courage by Eva Fogelman. About people who were rescuers during the Holocaust.
At Home by Bill Bryson. Still reading it slowly, but it’s good.
What If? (Volumes 1 and 2). Different historians write essays about events in history and how easily things could have been different if only… It hadn’t been such a rainy spring, etc. Very good and many writers to sample.
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (long but very worth it–among the very best books I’ve read in the past few years)
The Birth of the Pill by Jonathan Eig
The Triumph of Seeds by Thor Hanson (a mix of science and history)
The Anne Fadiman book that someone upthread recommended is amazing.
I highly, highly recommend The Shaking Woman: A History of My Nerves by Siri Hustvedt. It is a mix of personal history, medical history, psychoanalytic theory, literary history all packaged in a slim little volume. There’s also a component of the writer trying to unravel and make sense of her own illness. It is a very short book – almost a long essay – but highly recommended.
If you are looking for homework (and not enjoyable page-turners), there’s always Madness and Civilization by Foucault. A classic in the history-of-medicine genre, but so dense it is almost unreadable.
(My other sugestions are page-turners, I promise!)
Foucault and I have a love-hate relationship lol. Half of his stuff I engage with very heavily in my work and half of it feels like reading Mandarin @-)
Madness and Civilization is one that I bought a while ago and made it through about 10 pages before putting it aside. I know it’s something I need to read and be familiar with for my field… but I’m avoiding it
I actually only encountered Oliver Sacks for the first time this semester in a Med Anthro class. I have no idea how his stuff slipped under the radar for me. ,
The River of Doubt by Candace Millard- it’s about Teddy Roosevelt and his son and a harrowing trip down the Amazon.
Candace Millard also wrote Destiny of the Republic which is about the murder of President Garfield and the medicine of the time and is suppose to be very good. I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.
I second At Home by Bill Bryson- you learn all sorts of things about everyday items.
I don’t read non-fiction and I’m not a big fan of history books, but – anything by Bill Bryson is great. I especially liked “A Short History of Nearly Everything”: humorous, fascinating, and yes, historical. Plus, since it’s episodic, you can put it down and come back to it later, or you can read it while you’re reading other things.
I am a fan of Oliver Sacks too. I don’t read a lot of history, any more, but I do like reading memoirs that give a peak int other places or other times. So I just finished Reading Lolita in Tehran and the two Persopolis books with the CC Book Club and am currently reading Maus - which is as much about what the Holocaust did to the survivors as it is about the event itself. One fabulous memoir is Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. She came of age right before World War One and saw her world devasted.
Way back when I thought I’d major in history I did a history themed expository writing class. We read the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Maccauley’s History of England, both groundbreaking in their day. And Thucydides of course the granddaddy of them all.
