A Modest Construct

Posts tagged `history`

¶ 1776

1776 by David McCullough: Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Year: 2006; Pages: 400

I read McCullough’s biography of John Adams three years ago and found it every bit as amazing as the Pulitzer committee did. In the course of describing John Adams’ life, especially his role in the Continental Congress, involved no small number of words about the Revolutionary War; however, Adams being a congressman and not a military man, the martial details of that time period were largely absent from the book.

1776 was, apparently, written as a sort of companion piece to that biography. It’s both trademark McCullough and also somehow disappointing.

§7207 · August 18, 2011 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, history, nonfiction, reviews

¶ A History of Western Philosophy

A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell: Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Year: 1946/1967; Pages: 895

Bertrand Russell is known for two things, depending upon the tradition from which you approach him: he’s an early and ardent atheist (perhaps the grandfather of the recent “New Atheist” movement popularized by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett), as made clear in Why I Am Not a Christian. Much less controversially, his contributions as a mathematician and logician (for which see his and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica) were perhaps the most important to formal Logic since the early Greeks.

§7038 · May 8, 2011 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, history, nonfiction, philosophy, reviews

¶ Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter: Publisher: Gotham; Year: 2008; Pages: 256

One of the benefits of being an armchair linguist is that I have absolutely no qualms about veering from, say, Baugh and Cable’s A History of the English Language or the nominally rebellious but practically canonical works of David Crystal to less academic but infinitely more pleasurable works of dedicated amateurs like Bill Bryson. Our Magnificant Bastard Tongue falls into the latter category (though McWhorter sometimes resembles Crystal in tone), not only because McWhorter is a sort of nuovo-linguist, the sort who would wear sneakers before tweed jackets, but also because this particular book was intended to be a shorter and more information introduction to McWhorter’s sphere… essentially a 250-page brochure for modern linguistics.

§7027 · April 30, 2011 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, etymology, history, linguistics, nonfiction, reviews

¶ The Book Thief

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak: Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; Year: 2006/2007; Pages: 576

The Book Thief, along with its armful of literary awards, is technically a book for young adults, though, like the best young adult books (see John Green’s œuvre, which includes An Abundance of Katherines), it is really written for adults both young and old. The label may stem in part from the fact that its main character is a young girl; for some reason, stories written about children tend to be immediately dismissed as being written for children as well.

It is also, let us admit, yet another entry about the Holocaust into a very crowded market; more to the point, there are many memorable books about the Holocaust we already have. What new quality does The Book Thief give us?

§6973 · March 7, 2011 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, fiction, history, reviews

¶ Hunting Evil

Hunting Evil by Guy Walters: Publisher: Broadway; Year: 2010; Pages: 528

It has been more than a half-century since the Nazi rise to power; in that time, the Nazi ideology, its adherents, and its titular leader, Adolph Hitler, have come to be known in a stylized, somewhat exaggerated way. This is not to say that such opprobrium is any way undeserved; while the Nazis may not have been the most imaginatively cruel men to have murdered in the 20th century (regimes such as Pol Pot come to mind), the sheer scale and enthusiasm of their extermination of more than six million noncombatants has made them the favorite secular devil of the popular mind. Hence things like Godwin’s Law and the constant comparisons of George W. Bush and Barack Obama to Hitler (the former because, I suppose, he’s apparently a warmonger? and the latter because he apparently wants to gas your grandmother).

Needless to say, Nazis hold a certain place in the popular imagination, and for much of the civilized world, we desire nothing more than the application of justice to the outstanding iniquity of the Holocaust. That’s why figures such as Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi-hunter, are so revered, and why books about the topic sell so well.

§6117 · November 15, 2010 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, history, nonfiction, reviews