The Invention of Yesterday - Tamim Ansary

   2019; 407 pages.  Full Title: The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000 Year History of Human Culture, Connection.  New Author?  : Yes.  Genres : Ancient History; World History;  Non-Fiction; Anthropology.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    Okay, I admit it.  I’m a history nerd.  I’ve been one ever since 7^th grade when Mrs. Stoudt taught “World History 1”, introducing us to ancient empires and closing with the fall of the Roman Empire.  She made a profound impact on me, but I have noticed, however, that there’s a subtle bias in history classes, even if it’s a college history course.

 

    For instance, in the “Greeks vs. Persians” chapters (Alexander the Great, Thermopylae, Socrates, etc.) the Greeks are always portrayed as the heroic defenders of democracy; the Persians are always the evil bullies.  The Crusaders are invariably cast as the defenders of the Faith, even though they were invading the Near East.  And in 476 CE, after Rome was sacked, we entered the Dark Ages where evidently nothing notable happened anywhere in the world for the next 400 years.

 

    But how did those Persians view their wars with Greece?  What went through the minds of Palestinian Muslims (besides swords and arrows) when the Crusaders fought into the streets of Jerusalem?  And surely the empires in China, India, and the Middle East were doing something while Europe was enduring four centuries of the Dark Ages, right?

 

    Tamim Ansary examines all those questions, and a whole lot more, in his book, The Invention of Yesterday.

 

What’s To Like...

    As the subtitle indicates, Tamim Ansary places the dawn of human civilization at 50,000 BCE (after a brief review of terrestrial life dating back to 15 million BCE), when homo sapiens separated themselves from the rest of animal world via three innovations: tools, environment adaptation, and most importantly, language.  He divides The Invention of Yesterday into 31 chapters, covering world history from way back then up until now, with the last three chapters even giving his musings about where we’re headed.

 

    Squeezing 50 millennia of history into 400 pages is amazing, but what impressed me even more was the breadth of the realms that Ansary focuses on.  Events in China, India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt get just as much attention as European happenings.  The Americas and Africa also get some ink, albeit not as lengthy due to a lack of annals in those areas.

 

    The main point of the book is that there inevitably were a lot more interactions between all the various empires (aka “social constellations”; more on that in a bit.), not only via wars, but also through trading, traveling, technological advancements, and even plagues.  The author even goes so far as to suggest that “the policies of China’s Qing government did contribute to the birth of the United States.  Thank you for asking.”

 

    There are lots of maps, all of them easily expandable.  There are lots of footnotes, a majority of which are the author’s asides, and worth your time reading.  The text is crammed full of fascinating historical tidbits, including Mithraism (I once knew a devotee of it!); the “People of the Sea” (one of the great historical mysteries); Daevas (who?!); and the etymology of the word “Lombards”.

 

    So if you’re looking for a comprehensive history book that’s both enlightening and interesting, which goes beyond just “Western Civilization” and is filled with lots of facts and trivia, The Invention of Yesterday might be a perfect fit.  You’ll even get to see those invading Persians, the Crusaders, and the Dark Ages in an entirely different light.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.6*/5, based on 307 ratings and 61 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.27*/5, based on 1,022 ratings and 151 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Concatenation (n.) : a series of interconnected things or events.

Others : Reifying (v.).

 

Excerpts...

    In many cases, the paintings in a given cave were made over the course of thousands of years; people were coming there to paint, generation after generation.  But the oldest of them were made about forty thousand years ago, and the odd thing is, those earliest paintings were already quite sophisticated.  What hasn’t turned up are transitional products.  It’s not like Stone Age painters spent a few hundred generations learning to doodle and then a few hundred making blotches vaguely suggestive of animal shapes and then finally figuring out how to make recognizable horses and hunters.  Instead, it seems that around thirty-five to forty-five millennia ago, people rather suddenly started making sophisticated art.  (pg. 13)

 

    The Americas had grasslands too, but the hunter-gatherers who lived there never developed into pastoral nomadic civilizations capable of taking on the big urban powers.  Instead, they continued to refine their hunting-and-gathering way of life.  The reason is simple: North America had no animals that could be domesticated.  It had no sheep, no goats, no cows, nothing that could be herded.  It’s true that millions of bison roamed the great plains, but for some reason, these ill-tempered animals can’t be tamed, and when you can’t domesticate a grouchy two-ton animal with horns, you’d better not try to milk it.  (pg. 170)

 

Kindle Details…

    The Invention of Yesterday sells for $17.99 right now at Amazon.  Tamim Ansary has eight other e-books for your Kindle, ranging in price from $2.99 to $17.99.

 

In 1290, after populist rumors arose that Jews were eating Christian babies for Passover, all Jews of England were expelled.  (pg. 220)

    As one would expect, there’s very little cussing in The Invention of Yesterday; just 4 instances in the entire book: two “damns”, one “hell”, plus one “for Christ’s sake”.  The typos were few and far between, but more than I expected.  Examples: Atilla/Attila; lamas/llamas; unleased/unleashed; Columbia/Colombia; identity/identify; honey bees/honeybees.

 

    The author likes to coin phrases such as social constellations, social organisms, trialectic (a modification of “dialectic”), progress narrative, belief systems, and my favorite: bleshing (a portmanteau of ‘blending’ and ‘meshing’, referring to what happens when cultures, religions, and/or nations collide).  These are quite innovative, but sometimes I struggled to remember exactly what they meant.

 

    That’s all I can gripe about.  For me, The Invention of Yesterday was a great read, giving me new insights into all sorts of historical interactions and an opportunity to learn about various ancient empires that existed in places outside of Europe.  I’m looking forward to reading more books by this author.

 

    9½ Stars.  One last thing.  There’s a small town here in Arizona called Bisbee.  It’s not well known, and mostly exists for artists and tourists who want to experience that “Old West” feeling.  Incredibly, it gets mentioned in The Invention of Yesterday (pg. 75).  Wowza.

The Collected What If? - Robert Cowley

    2001; 827 pages.  New Authors? : Yes.  Full Title: The Collected What If?  Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been.  Edited by Robert Cowley.  Genres : Essays; World History; Speculative History; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    I remember the first Alternate History book I ever read.  Its title was If the South Had Won the Civil War, and Wikipedia lists its author as MacKinlay Kantor and that it was first published in 1961.  The book was short, there were some neat pictures in it, and I still recall a lot of the plot details.

 

    I’m guessing it was a Weekly Reader offering, meaning the target audience was Juveniles.  It sparked a lifelong love of the Alt History genre in me; I still read the genre quite frequently.

 

    Which means Robert Cowley’s opus, The Collected What If, was a personal must-read.  Forty-five essays, penned by all sorts of historians, each one examining a pivotal point in history and speculating as to what would happen if things went differently.

 

    Me reading it was a match made in Alternate History heaven, and the three alternate timeline scenarios for the Civil War brought back fond YA reading memories.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Collected What If is a compilation of two of Robert Cowley’s collections of “counterfactual” essays that contains 20 (plus 14 sidebars) and 25 entries (no sidebars) respectively.  The entries are arranged chronologically in both volumes.  Volume One was strictly military what-ifs; Volume 2’s contents were broadened to include some non-military topics, such as what the USA would’ve been like if Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and John F. Kennedy had never made it to the White House.

 

    Despite the titular “What If” motif, there is a lot of factual history covered here.  That’s logical, since you can’t discuss alternatives until you’ve presented what really occurred.  In fact, a majority of the essays spend much more time on the actual historical events than on what might have been.  The introduction also points out that the book’s content deliberately avoids “frivolous counterfactuals”.  Musing about what Hannibal could have done if he had an H-Bomb, or Napoleon with a stealth bomber, is just plain silly.  The counterfactual has to be plausible.

 

    Personally, I found the actual history accounts just as fascinating as the counterfactuals.  The British could have easily won the Revolutionary War, and Lincoln’s famous Emancipation Proclamation was more a clever political ploy than a great moral step forward.  My favorite essays were mostly those that dealt with ancient history (such as what if the Persian armies had won the Battle of Salamis), but that’s probably a reflection of my personal tastes of reading history books.

 

    The essays are replete with trivial tidbits.  I learned that the concepts of “freedom” and “citizen” did not exist until the Greeks came along.  The etymology of the word “slave” was interesting, and there’s a good reason why George Washington never wrote any memoirs.  It was neat to see two of my heroes, Vercingetorix and Wilfred Owen, getting some ink, and the eerie circumstances and timing around the 1948 deaths of Lawrence Duggan and Harry Dexter White makes me wonder what really goes on in the higher echelons of American national security.

 

    There are some helpful counterfactual maps and illustrations scattered throughout the book.  The longest essay was 34 pages long; the shortest was a mere 9 pages.  Each essay has a catchy title and subtitle to go with it.  For example: “Napoleon’s Invasion of North America: Aedes aegypti takes a holiday”, which should whet the literary appetite of any alt-history reader.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 76 ratings and 35 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.82/5 based on 603 ratings and 77 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Diapason (n.) : a grand swelling burst of harmony.

Others: Auto da-fe (n.); Legerdemain (n.); Irrupted (v.).

 

Excerpts...

    Only eleven [German U-boats] were delivered in 1914.  But (. . .) attrition remained very low, since the Royal Navy had little in the way of defenses.

    The initial English efforts against the submarine bordered on the laughable.  Picketboats armed with blacksmiths’ hammers were sent out to smash periscopes; attempts were made to catch submarines with nets like cod; sea lions were even trained to seek out unwanted submerged intruders—none of which met more than the slightest degree of success.  (pg. 602)

 

    But for the potato, what different roads history might have taken?  Would Spain have become such a vast Imperial power, presiding over the first empire in history on which the sun never set?  (Its wealth would be rooted in a mound of silver mined by potato-fed conscript laborers.)  Would Frederick the Great’s Prussia have survived without the potato in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), paving the way, ultimately, for the ascension of Germany?  . . .  How many crises of the Cold War, one wonders, were fueled by potato-based vodka?  And would we now, in a rare interval of relative peace, be appreciating van Gogh’s first major, and truly memorable, painting, The Potato Eaters?  (pg. 813)

 

Pascal suggested (in his Pensées) that if Cleopatra had been born with a somewhat larger nose, Mark Antony would have defeated Octavian at Actium.  (pg. 429)

    Unsurprisingly, profanity is sparse in The Collected What If; I spotted just ten instances in the entire 827 pages; and those were mostly in direct quotes of historical figures.  One of those was an f-bomb.

 

    There also were a few typos, such as: cause/caused; want/wont; lead/led; and the bizarre enchiphered/enciphered.  How spellchecker missed that last one mystifies me.

 

    Some readers were understandably disappointed in the factual/counterfactual ratio.  That didn’t bother me, but I love reading about history, no matter whether it's actual or speculative.  Also, keep in mind this is an 827-page, full-sized, hardcover book; reading it will be a significant investment of time.  It took me a full month to get through it.

 

    For me, The Collected What If was a great history read, both the real and the imagined parts.  As memorable as MacKinlay Kantor’s book was, it was neat to see what a bunch of historians can do to make the genre a reading delight for adult audiences as well.

 

    9½ Stars.  We would be remiss if we didn’t mention the final entry in the book, and the only one that violated the chronological order system: “What if Pizarro had not found potatoes in Peru: The humble roots of history”.  The second excerpt above, is from it.  It borders of being whimsical, but was actually food for thought.  Pun intended.

The Roman Revolution - Nick Holmes

    2022; 245 pages.  Book 1 (out of 2) in “The Fall of the Roman Empire” series.  Full Title: The Roman Revolution: Crisis and Christianity in Ancient Rome.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : World History; Rome; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    Quick, think back to that World History class when you were in Junior High, High School or college.  What year marked the end of the Roman Empire, according to your instructor?

 

    I was taught it happened in 476 CE, when the German warlord Odoacer forced the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, to abdicate and installed his own lackey on the throne.

 

    But that was just the end of the Western Roman Empire.  The Eastern Roman Empire, with its capital city of Constantinople, was still doing fine, and decided not to go retake the city of Rome from the barbarians.  So you could say 330 CE was the end for Rome, as justified in the second excerpt, below.

 

    The Eastern Roman Empire, later renamed the Byzantine Empire, survived another millennium, until the Ottomans finally destroyed it in 1453 CE.  So that’s another possible answer.

 

    Nick Holmes proposes a different date, 718 CE, and plans to present his case for that year in a four-volume series chronicling Rome’s demise.  The first volume covers the rise of Rome’s fortunes, and presages the debacle coming in 476 CE.  Its title is The Roman Revolution.

 

What’s To Like...

    After a brief overview via an Introduction, Nick Holmes divides The Roman Revolution into five parts (Title, Year Start, Kindle %), namely:

    Republic:  ~ 500-1000 BCE  (5%)

    Empire: 44 BCE  (18%)

    Decline: ~ 170 CE  (27%)

    Crisis: 248 CE  (36%)

    Revolution: 268 CE  (52%)

 

    Those titles give you a hint of what was going on.  Nobody is sure just exactly when Rome was founded, but they had a couple kings to begin with, then switched to being a Republic.  Julius Caesar’s death marks the start of the Empire.  The Decline is a gradual phenomenon and is due to Germanic invaders and a pandemic plague.  Crisis sees another plague, more invading Germans, weak emperors, Persians tearing up the eastern border of the Empire, and climate change messing up the food supply.  Revolution sees a couple strong emperors, most notably Constantine and Diocletian, revitalizing the empire, at least temporarily.  The text wraps up with Constantine’s death in 337 CE.

 

    The book is written in English, not American, so you get spellings such as armoured, outmanoeuvred, artefacts, jewellery, despatched, and judgement.  Spellchecker nixed all but one of those words (artefacts), but frankly, if you’re from America, it reads just fine.

 

    I liked the “tone” of Nick Holmes’s text.  The Roman Empire is neither presented as a glorious ideal, nor as a cruel tyranny.  There are reasons why it thrived among other peoples (such as the Etruscans, the Greeks, and the Carthaginians) and why, as all empires must, it eventually declined and fell.

 

    I also appreciated the author’s efforts to demythologize Roman history.  The wolf-suckled twins, Romulus and Remus, never existed.  Caesar never said, “Et tu, Brute” (Shakespeare did).  Constantine’s “vision of the cross” was a story invented later on by others.  And the degree of persecution of the early Christians in the empire varied from place-to-place and time-to-time, and was most likely, in most cases, overstated.

 

    It was fun to see some of the pagan religions—Druids, Mithras, Zoroastrianism, et al.—get some ink.  The footnotes worked flawlessly, which is a notable feat in Kindle e-books.  There are also some useful and interesting maps and images, about a dozen or so of each.  They worked almost as smoothly as the footnotes, although occasionally the link would drop me off at, say, image #1, when it was supposed to be redirecting to, say, image #12.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 406 ratings and 22 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.34/5 based on 248 ratings and 15 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    There was no survival of fundamentalist Gallic beliefs that could seriously undermine Roman rule.  The best example is that of the Druids, who had always been the most powerful religious and cultural challenge to the Romans, but in Gaul they simply melted away.  By the first century AD, it was simply not cool to be a Druid any more.  But it was cool to be a Roman.  (loc. 724)

 

    [Constantine] turned to the cheering people.  They fell silent.  Then he addressed them.  He declared he would now dedicate this new city.  Henceforth it would no longer be called Byzantium but Constantinopolis, ‘Constantine’s City’.

    The date was 11 May 330.  Little could the thousands of people gathered in the Forum of Constantine, including Constantine himself, have realised that for centuries to come this date would be seen as a historic turning point, the marking of a new era.  For it is now seen as the beginning of the second age of the Roman Empire.  The age when power passed from Rome to Constantinople.  (loc. 2577)

 

Kindle Details…

    Right now, The Roman Revolution sells for $2.99 at Amazon.  Book 2, The Fall of Rome, goes for the same amount.  Nick Holmes offers a third e-book at Amazon, also in the History genre, The Byzantine World War; you can pick it up for a mere $0.99.

 

“Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.” [Polybius] (loc. 286)

    As you’d expect from a nonfiction History tome, profanity is almost nonexistent – just a single “hell”, in the whole book.  Surprisingly, this was the author’s own utterance, not a quote of someone else’s vocabulary.  I only spotted one typo: Mark Anony/Anthony, which means the editor did a great job.

 

    The “Christians” in the book’s subtitle don’t show up until about 76% (chapter 36 out of 41), and frankly, unlike what you may have been taught in school, get very little blame here for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.  However, there’s more than a century to go before the 476 CE Doomsday, so it’s possible they’ll shoulder more of the blame in Book 2.

 

    The Roman Revolution was an educational and enjoyable read for me, but it helps that I'm a lifelong history buff.  I was amazed that Nick Holmes could condense a millennium’s worth of history into 245 pages and still make it feel like a comprehensive treatise.

 

    I’ve got the Book 2 in this series on my Kindle and am looking forward to reading about the next one hundred years of Roman history, which I was taught ends in disaster for the capital city.  I have not picked up Books 3 and 4 yet, which are briefly previewed in the “Find Out More” section in the back of The Roman Revolution.  But that’s because they haven’t been published yet.

 

    9 Stars.  We’ll wrap this up on a lighter note taken from The Roman Revolution.  The acronym SPQR has long been associated with the Roman Empire.  You’ve been taught it stands for “Senatus Populusque Romanus”, Latin for “the Roman Senate and People”.  But modern Italians will jokingly tell you that it means “Sono pazzi questi Romani”, which translates into “They’re crazy, these Romans’.

The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky

   1999; 359 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genres : World History; Spain; France; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

 

    The Basques.  Like most people, I’ve heard of them, but don’t know much about them.

 

    I vaguely remember them making headlines back in the 1970s for killing Spanish policemen by remotely detonating bombs.  So I’m pretty sure the Basques are concentrated in some area of Spain.

 

    They have their own language too.  It seems neat that they’re maintaining their heritage, but jeez, if you live in Spain, shouldn’t you be speaking Spanish?  I also recall that their language bears no resemblance to any other European tongue, which makes it a mystery as to where they came from and when they showed up.

 

    I’m a lover of History, so my ignorance about the Basques is embarrassing.  Fortunately, one of my favorite History authors, Mark Kurlansky, wrote a book on them, The Basque History of the World.

 

    Let’s find out why the Basques don’t like to speak anything but Basque.

 

What’s To Like...

    Mark Kurlansky divides The Basque History of the World into three sections, namely:

        Section 1 : The Survival of Euskal Herria

        Section 2 : The Dawn of Euskadi

        Section 3 : Euskadi Askatuta

 

    Those titles represent a progression in the self-identity of Basques.  “Euskal Herria” means “the Land where Euskera (“Basque”) is spoken”, and simply denotes a place.  “Euskadi” is a word coined by a Basque nationalist, Sabino Arana, and can be roughly translated as “Euskera speakers together”, and implying that it is a country, not merely a location.  “Euskadi Askatuta” means “Free Basqueland” and recognizes that achieving an independent Basque nation may necessitate a revolution.

 

    Each section has an introduction plus 4-6 chapters, and things close with a "Postscript" titled “The Death of a Basque Pig”.  The book chronicles the Basque history from the earliest writings about them (courtesy of the Romans since the Basque ancestors left no written records) up through the 1990s (the time of publication).  A lot of the latter chapters go decade-by-decade, starting with the 1930s; many of the earlier chapters use the clever template “The Basque Xxx” format (“The Basque Cake”, “The Basque Whale”, “The Basque Beret”, “The Basque Ear”, etc.) to pique the reader's interest.

 

    The Basque History of the World nicely combines both historically important events, such as the importance of the math formula “4 + 3 = 1” and the idiocy of witch trials, with enlightening trivial tidbits, such as recipes for cat dishes, which sounds yucky, but are useful when the Spaniards are besieging your city and you're starving.  I chuckled when the renowned “Bilbo swords” were mentioned; they have nothing to do with Hobbits.  I came away with a much greater appreciation as to what Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” masterpiece is all about, and was sobered by the fatalistic Basque adage “una bache mas, un cabron menos”, which I'll leave for you to look up the translation, or read this book.

 

    Mark Kurlansky includes various maps, drawings, and photos throughout the book.  Some of the latter could use a bit of computer-enhancement, but maybe that’s just a printing issue with the paperback format I read.  The Index at the back of the book comes in handy, although it’s limited to proper nouns.  Beyond the “basted cat” entrée already mentioned, there are various other Basque culinary recipes mixed in with the text .  This is a Mark Kurlansky trademark in the books he writes, and they sound delicious, but they are wasted on me since my cooking skills are abysmal.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.6/5 based on 438 ratings and 240 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.87/5 based on 4,409 ratings and 422 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Auto de fe (n., phrase) : a public ceremony during which the sentences upon those brought before the Spanish Inquisition were read and after which the sentences were executed by secular authorities.

 

Excerpts...

    By the sixteenth century, witchcraft should have seemed a ridiculously old-fashioned accusation.  In 787, Charlemagne had outlawed the execution of witches and made it a capital crime to burn a witch.  A tenth-century Church law, Canon Episcopi, demanded that priests preach against belief in witchcraft as superstition.  By the fourteenth-century, stories of witchcraft were widely dismissed among educated circles as a primitive belief of peasants.

    But by the late sixteenth century, the Canon Episcopi, which had been universal Church law, was being circumvented by the claim that society was faced with a new and more virulent form of witchcraft and therefore the old laws did not apply.  (pg. 93)

 

    The Basques are not isolationists.  They never wanted to leave Europe.  They only wanted to be Basque.  Perhaps it is the French and the Spanish, relative newcomers, who will disappear in another 1,000 years.  But the Basques will still be there, playing strange sports, speaking a language of ks and xs that no one else understands, naming their houses and facing them toward the eastern sunrise in a land of legends, on steep green mountains by a cobalt sea—still surviving, enduring by the grace of what Juan San Martin called Euskaldun bizi nahia, the will to live like a Basque.  (pg. 351)

 

Revolutions are always easier to admire from across the border.  (pg. 135)

    The editing is good in The Basque History of the World; I only noticed two typos: finely/finally and peeled/pealed.  As you’d expect of a Historical Non-Fiction tome, the text is incredibly clean: just a single “damn” which got in only because it was part of a direct quotation.

 

    I did find one “fact” in the book to take issue with.  On page 138, the author asserts that the word “honcho” is of Basque origin, coming from their “jauntxo”, meaning a wealthy, powerful, rural landowner.  Plausible, but every other etymological source on the Internet says "honcho" comes from the Japanese word “hancho” meaning a group leader, and brought back to the US by servicemen stationed in Japan.  Methinks somebody in Basqueland was pulling Mark Kurlansky’s leg.

 

    Also, it should be noted that there is a definite pro-Basque, anti-Spanish slant to The Basque History of the World, particularly when the subject is the iron-fisted Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco.  I doubt that Mark Kurlansky will offer any apologies for this, but I do recall one of the Basque nationalist groups, the “ETA”, being classified as a Terrorist Group due to the bombings they carried out against the Spanish police back in the 70s.

 

    8 Stars.  Overall, The Basque History of the World gave me a much better understanding of history – both ancient and recent – of the Basque people, the Basque culture, the Basque heroes, and most of all, the Basque hopes for a country of their own.  Such aspirations may or may not be realistic, but they certainly are inspirational.

Napoleon's Hemorrhoids - Phil Mason

   2010; 243 pages (including the Introduction, but not the Index).  Full Title: Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids – And Other Small Events that Changed History.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Historical Trivia; Non-Fiction; History - Anecdotes.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

 

    There is a famous proverb titled ”For want of a nail”.  Wikipedia says it’s been around since the 13^th century, and it comes in many variations.  One of the shorter versions is:

 

   “For want of a nail the shoe was lost;
    For want of a shoe the horse was lost;
    For want of a horse the battle was lost;
    For the failure of battle the kingdom was lost—
    All for the want of a horse-shoe nail.”

 

    The principle of the proverb is that small changes in seemingly insignificant actions can sometimes have major impacts on history-making events.  Sounds far-fetched, doesn’t it?

 

    In Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids, Phil Mason offers up a slew of examples of this, in all sorts of fields such as history, politics, business, sports, science, and even the arts.  Wacky things, such as Napoleon’s hemorrhoids flaring up on the morning of the Battle of Waterloo, may have changed the course of history.

 

    Over and over, you’ll find yourself “what if such and such an incidental event had never occurred"?

 

What’s To Like...

    Napoleon’s  Hemorrhoids consists of ten chapters, each spotlighting a different area.  They are:

    Chapter 01: Detours in the Match of History

    Chapter 02: Politics – Fates and Fortunes

    Chapter 03: History’s Tricks – Accidents, Illnesses and Assassinations

    Chapter 04: The Fog of War

    Chapter 05: Science – Inspiration, Invention and Intrigue

    Chapter 06: Chance Beginnings

    Chapter 07: Artistic Strokes (of Luck)

    Chapter 08: “Unlucky, Sport!”

    Chapter 09: Crime – Missed Demeanours

    Chapter 10: Business – Enterprise and Intuition

    None of the chapters are in the least bit boring, and it's no surprise that Chapter 4, The Fog of War, is the longest one, logging in at 47 pages.

 

    The author is lives in England, which means the book is written in "English", not "American".  So you encounter spellings like tranquillity, centred, tyres, licence, 40-storey, and have to figure out what the phrase “cock a snook” means, which is given below.  The entries are generally short – sometimes just one or two paragraphs, occasionally as long as a page or two.

 

    I was already aware of some of the entries, such as:

    The Battle of Gettysburg was an accident and only happened because all because one army wanted some boots.

    In Central America in 1969, a war was fought over a soccer match.

    How rabbits were introduced, and then ran like a plague unchecked over Australia.

    The USA ignored numerous warnings leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor,

    How Post-It notes were developed.

    Captain Oates’ final Antarctic walk.

 

    But most of the entries were new to me.  I learned lots of new trivia, such as:

    How the Alaskan city of Nome got its name.

    Bayer once marketed heroin as a commercial product.

    The last words of Albert Einstein.

    The controversy about the naming of Uranus. <snickers>

    How close we came to starting a nuclear war in 1962.

 

    There’s a 14-page index in the back which came in quite handy while I was reading the book.  Don’t be misled by the text’s overall lighthearted tone and the fact that its target audience is the British public.  There are a lot of wonderful and little-known historical anecdotes here that really will make you pause to wonder how big a part serendipity played in history down through the millennia.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Cock a snook (v., phrase) : to openly show contempt or a lack of respect for someone or something..

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.1*/5, based on 520 ratings and 184 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.36*/5, based on 1,304 ratings and 71 reviews.

 

 

Excerpts...

    The change of weather from the heat of Algeria to a European winter gave Arnaud a terrific cold.  As he led his forces to confront a mob resisting the coup he is said to have caught a coughing fit.  As it ended, he cursed “Ma sacrée toux” (“My damned cough!”).  The head of the Guard misheard it as “Massacrez tous” (“Massacre them all”) and launched an assault on the crowd.  Up to 800 people are believed to have been killed.  It was the pivotal moment in turning the tide of the coup.  (pg. 9)

 

    The West African state of Benin had its entire air force destroyed in 1988 by a single errant golf shot.

    Metthieu Goya, a ground technician and keen golfer, was practising on the airfield during a lunchtime break when he sliced a drive.  Th ball struck the windscreen of a jet fighter that was preparing to take off, causing it to career into the country’s other four jets neatly lined up by the runway.  All five aircraft were write-offs.  (pg. 68)

 

New York became British because of a Dutch obsession with nutmegs.  (pg. 5)

    The quibbles are minor.

 

    As noted, Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids is written with the British reading audience in mind.  Thus the chapters generally start out with entries that involve English activities, then follow with ones involving the rest of the world.  This was generally not off-putting to a Yankee reader like me, except for the chapter on sports which led off with a number of entries about the quaint but unfathomable sport of cricket.

 

    Also, Phil Mason rarely if ever lists the sources of the small-but-impactful events he cites.  True, in these days of Google and Wikipedia, researching something on your own is easy, and yes, if he had devoted 50 pages to “Notes and Sources” I’d be bitching about how many trees he was killing to produce those pages (I read the hardcover version).

 

    The most egregious of this came on page 28, with an anecdote about a “would-be minister who has remained unidentified” blowing a one-on-one interview given by the British Prime Minister because the applicant was in “fawning mode” too much.  Exactly how could there by a source for that?

 

    That’s about it.  Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids is an incredibly clean read.  The lone cussword was on page six, and was a “lavatorial allusion” attributed to Martin Luther, and the lone typo I caught was the often-encountered “loose/lose” mix-up.

 

    Overall, Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids was exactly what I was looking for.  It wasn’t an in-depth scholarly treatise, but it was never intended to be.  What it was, was both an enlightening and a fun read.

 

    7½ Stars.  One last thing.  As Americans, we are given a decidedly slanted viewpoint when it comes to teaching United States History.  Basically, we never did anything stupid or wrong.  So it was interesting to read the more objective viewpoints of a British author concerning our country's actions.

From Dawn to Decadence - Jacques Barzun

   2000; 802 pages (plus appendices and notes).  New Author? : Yes.  Full Title: From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life.  Genres : Non-Fiction; European History; History of Civilization and Culture.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

    Hey, let’s read a history book!  And not something short and easy-to-read; let’s find a book that’s more than 800 pages long and written in a “scholarly” style.

    With that many pages, let’s have it cover the last 5 centuries.  It can show how different things were way back in 1500, and what changes occurred to bring us to where we are now.  And for a twist, instead of concentrating on events such as who won what battle, and which king led what army, let’s focus on the cultural aspects of history: Art, Science, Religion, Philosophy, and Social Thought.

    Finally, let’s find a curmudgeonly author, preferably some old French dude.

    Like Jacques Barzun and his fantastic book, From Dawn To Decadence.

What’s To Like...

    From Dawn to Decadence is divided into four chronological revolutions, namely:

        Part 1: The 16^th Century religious revolution

        Part 2: the 17^th Century monarchical revolution

        Part 3: the 18^th/19^th Century French liberal and individualist revolutions, and

        Part 4: the 20^th Century Russian social and collective revolution.

    As indicated above, the book focuses on the cultural aspects of civilization.  Some attention is of course also given to “history” when it’s needed, generally via sections labeled “A View From…”.  Barzun keeps these as short as possible though.  The (American) Civil War gets scant attention, Columbus’s discovery of America is barely noted.  The two World Wars get a bit more ink, probably because Jacques Barzun experienced both of them firsthand.

    The attention to the Arts (Music, Poetry, Plays, Sculpture, Literature, etc.) is incredibly detailed.  Major artists are duly covered, but so are a slew of minor luminaries, many of whom Barzun feels have been unjustly forgotten.  He also demythologizes “revered icons” such as Thoreau, Calvin, Erasmus, and Martin  Luther, pointing out their character warts and blemishes.  I enjoyed reading a French author’s take on American history.  At a time when “my country right or wrong” mentality is again rearing its ugly head, it’s refreshing to read something objective and accurate.

    The book is a trivia lover’s treasure trove.  Some examples: the “real” Jethro Tull, tulip mania, “Ubu”, Balzac’s “Waiting for Gadeau” (by Balzac; now you know from where Samuel Beckett got his title), Manutius, bundling, the origin of the word ‘scientist’, Henry Purcell, John Cage’s magnificent musical composition called 4’3" (YouTube it), how the development of the railroad necessitated the creation of Time Zones, and Erasmus’s disdain for (what was for him) modern music.  Barzun even gives separate indexes for Persons (23 pages) and Subjects (24 pages) for ease of reference.

    The ending is kind of a downer. Barzun revels in the glorious past (as any historian should), but he’s pretty jaded about the present state of things like Sports, Computers, Art, Science, Religion, Acronyms, Language, and Education.  His pet word for all of these is “demotic”, which means (I had to look it up): common, casual, colloquial, used by the masses.  But since Barzun was in his nineties when From Dawn to Decadence was published, I can’t help to wonder if he was dismayed by the speed at which the modern world was whizzing by him.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Valetudinarians (n., plural) : people who are unduly anxious about their health.

Others : Primogeniture (n.); Perdurable (adj.); Rutilant (adj.); Demotic (adj.).

Excerpts...

    We have got into the habit of calling too many things revolutions.  Given a new device or practice that changes our homely habits, we exclaim: “revolutionary!”  But revolutions change more than personal habits or a widespread practice.  They give culture a new face.  Between the great upheaval of the 1500s and the present, only three later ones are of the same order.  True, the history books give the name to a dozen or more such violent events, but in these uprisings it was only the violence that was great.  (pg. 3)

    Judge of my surprise to see poor dear Mrs. Hornem with her arms half round the loins of a huge hussar-like gentleman I never set eyes on before and his more than half round her waist, turning round and round to a d----d see-saw, upside down sort of tune.  I asked what all this means: “Can’t you see they are valtzing – or waltzing?”  (I forget which).  Now that I know what it is, I like it – Horace Hornem, Country gentleman.

    -Byron, “To The Publisher” or “The Waltz” (1812).  (pg. 500)

Monarchy and monotheism go together; in heaven there are no struggles such as one sees among the pagan gods and goddesses.  (pg. 249 )

    From Dawn to Decadence is considered to be Jacques Barzun’s magnum opus, and deservedly so.  For me the book was a slow-but-easy read.  (Is that an oxymoron?)  The abundance of trivia was great when it was interesting, but grew tedious if it was something I had limited interest in, such as Philosophy.

    Or when he gets wordy and pedantic.  Barzun spends 28 pages (!!) discussing the word Eutopian (his preferred spelling) and 26 pages to the word Baroque.  He devotes separate sections (4-8 pages apiece) for discussing the meaning of man, esprit, romantic, and pragmatic.  His discourse about “man” centers on whether it is specifically a male person, or whether it can denote either gender.  As in the term “Renaissance man”.  To his credit, Barzun is an avowed feminist, so such distinctions are important to him.

    At times, his curmudgeon persona also wore thin.  Barzun doesn’t seem to have much trust in Science and Technology, which is a bummer since I’m a chemist.  He also resents anyone calling the Middle Ages barbaric.  Serfs had it pretty good, in his opinion.  OTOH, University students don’t appreciate how good they have it, and Puritans were actually good guys.  Towards the end of the book, when discussing Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and modern Medicine, it seems like he’s struggling to grasp the concepts.

    But let’s be clear; this is a spectacular book, even if it often numbed my brain after 20 or 30 pages.  When that occurred, I just shut it and did some light reading to resuscitate my gray matter.  I’ve read other books that were great, but brain-numbing, such as ones by Brian Greene (reviewed here), David Foster Wallace (reviewed here), and  Fyodor Dostoevsky (reviewed here).  "Mind-numbing" means the book is challenging, and that's generally a good sign.  It just means you'd better be ready to devote some serious reading time to the tome.  It took me six weeks to read make it through From Dawn to Decadence, but I’m glad I tackled it.

    9 Stars.  In case you’re curious about some of the not-so-famous people given major ink in From Dawn to Decadence, here are some examples: Christine de Pisan, John Lilburne (*), Fénelon (*), Giambattista Vico, Pierre Bayle, Beaumarchais, Georg Lichtenberg, Sydney Smith (*), Walter Bagehot (*), and James Agate.  Those marked with an asterisk were particularly noteworthy.