Grand unified books thread

[Ed Anger]

Nobody cares about the rest of the world.

[Grey Fox]

& WWZ movies barely going to be about the book.

[CountDeMoney]

fhdz and others mentioned Antifragile the other week;  is it a continuation and should Black Swan be read first, or is Antifragile a work on its own?

[Razgovory]

I've read mixed reviews on that.  One that it's interesting and gives a good idea what kind of man Stalin was, and others that say it focuses too much on gossip and not real history.  I've been on the fence on that one.

I don't like that dichotomy.

Court of the Red Tsar is an attempt at giving a biography of Stalin and the other leading Bolsheviks from, roughly, 1930 until the end of his life. It doesn't seem gossipy, I've only got the paperback version but there's a huge number of thanks for interviews with children of the Politburo and others, so it seems to be based on lots of original research.

But his goal isn't to tell you a great deal about the Ukrainian famine, or any of the other policies. Rather he's interested in how Stalin and those around him manage it. How they receive the information, or build the conspiracies, or denounce themselves or one another and then how they reach decisions that lead to the implementation of those policies.

With that you have the life of the magnates which moves from being pretty spartan but collegiate to being rather grim and terrifying. They'd get the call out to Stalin's dacha where he'd make them drink and play jokes on each other, or slow dance with one another, while he was actually drinking disguised water, weak tea or watered down wine.

I think it's no good if you want a history of the Stalinist period but is perhaps better if you want a sense of the mentality of the era. If you want to know about the Ukrainian famine or the purges then it'd be better getting a book about them, rather than this.

I've been thinking of reading that one day, I assume one should read Young Stalin if chronology is a concern.

Well I've just read Court of the Red Tsar which is 1930-53. Young Stalin's 1878-1917. But chronology's not a concern.

I got off the fence and picked up the Red Tsar.  Now I can't put it down.  Only gripe is that it starts in the early thirties when he's already first amongst equals and on his way to become totalitarian dictator.  I'm curious about his struggles with Trotsky after Lenin's death.  I suppose that's in his other book, Young Stalin.  Stalin is not at all what I expected.  I suppose a lot of Stalin's image in the West was propagated by Trotsky and his followers.  He's not the vulgar, grim bandit-turned-bureaucrat that he's often depicted as.  While bandit and bureaucrat are there, he's surprisingly cultured, very well read with an appreciation for poetry and literature.  He is also quite charming which surprised me.  He's reminds of one of those ruthless centralizing late medieval monarchs or a mafioso head.

[Josephus]

& WWZ movies barely going to be about the book.

Yeah, what I figured.

[Syt]

Reading Samurai: The Japanese Warrior's [Unofficial] Manual. Not bad, and slightly tongue in cheek (masquerading as a manual written in 1615), but not quite as good as its Legionnaire counterpart which remains my favorite of the series.

I haven't read the Gladiator entry in the series yet (written by the same guy as the Legionnaire manual and the pretty good "Ancient Rome on 5 Denarii a Day").

[Kleves]

Who has the better book about the Russian Revolution - Richard Pipes or Orlando Figes?

[fhdz]

fhdz and others mentioned Antifragile the other week;  is it a continuation and should Black Swan be read first, or is Antifragile a work on its own?

You definitely can read it on its own.

[Malthus]

Reading Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe by Norman Davies. So far, it's very, very good.

[garbon]

I had wanted to read it but I wasn't sure how much I'd like him compiling chapters on a bunch of different states all drawn together only because they no longer exist.

[Malthus]

I had wanted to read it but I wasn't sure how much I'd like him compiling chapters on a bunch of different states all drawn together only because they no longer exist.

The theme is on the nature of historical memory; the examples are entertaining in and of themselves, but they are not of course in any way comprehensive.

I found the chapter on "Galicia" particularly interesting, as it is the country from which both my mother's ancestors and my wife's came from - yet I'd barely heard of it; it's vanished underneath Poland and Ukraine, but fairly recently (it died at the end of WW1 and its population was massacred and the remaints scattered to the winds in WW2).

[garbon]

Oh thanks for that. Definitely my cup of tea then.

[crazy canuck]

Reading Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe by Norman Davies. So far, it's very, very good.

I was thinking of picking that up.  Thanks for the recommendation.

[Grey Fox]

Once again, Malthus pulls out a solid.

35$ for an Ebook, I don't think soooooo, no.

[Josephus]

Same author put out another book, The History of Europe, several years ago that I liked. This looks good, too, but alas, I'm on a budget now.