I’m not generally a reader of History…I mean, why read about dead people and dead years? Don’t we know how the story ends? A biography of Lincoln would perhaps include his assassination by John Wilkes Booth (NEWS FLASH!)
But two books of a specific era have caught me…the first Paris 1919 by Margaret Hamilton took me more than a year to read…it was written wonderfully, but the material was so fraught with implications of our own times that I would practically weep after every chapter…the arrogant divisions of territory (Iraq was created from three tribes to create a country for oil exploitation….and does that reverberate through the ages or what?)…on and on….tough reading just because of the weight it brought to this world
This latest took me less than a week…Philipp Blom’s The Vertigo Years is an exercise of descriptive history that really does hurtle you into a vortex of super-concentrated history, a conflation of circumstance and personality, of the beginnings of this fevered century from the perspective of Europe, 1900-1914. Connections can be made (and you will) between the circumstance of our time and the one described. It’s heavy reading but written in a whirly way that befits the chaos of the times, now and then. Highly recommended by a person that, again, really doesn’t get into history much
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