Grand unified books thread

[The Brain]

Plus, I am convinced that no author can manage even six good books in a series.

Doubters of Gor.

[Agelastus]

Has anyone read those series of books, and are they any good?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Brook

My mother;  there are some of the later books in the series on her shelves in what was her bedroom. I can remember glancing at them a good few years ago and not being overly interested in reading them in full.

I can spoil the overall end of the series for you though if wikipedia doesn't give it away.

Anyway, suffice it to say my mother enjoyed them enough to buy them at a time when she was also buying Frank Herbert and Anne McCaffrey if I am remembering the prices correctly.

[Example of inflation in the Seventies. Immediately post decimalisation books were 25 new pence. At the end of the decade/beginning of the Eighties between £2.00 and £3.00.]

[The Brain]

Just got a sweet shipment of stuff from the Lance & Longbow Society. Detailed booklets on orders of battle, participants, banners, and livery of the Wars of the Roses, and 2 CDs with the first 100 issues of The Hobilar. If you're into the WotR (or medieval warfare in general) and haven't checked out the Society, do so!

[jimmy olsen]

Just got a sweet shipment of stuff from the Lance & Longbow Society. Detailed booklets on orders of battle, participants, banners, and livery of the Wars of the Roses, and 2 CDs with the first 100 issues of The Hobilar. If you're into the WotR (or medieval warfare in general) and haven't checked out the Society, do so!

I recommend Hawkwood, a manga about John Hawkwood and his career as a mercenary during the 100 year war.

http://fanfox.net/manga/hawkwood/v01/c001/1.html

[The Brain]

Just got a sweet shipment of stuff from the Lance & Longbow Society. Detailed booklets on orders of battle, participants, banners, and livery of the Wars of the Roses, and 2 CDs with the first 100 issues of The Hobilar. If you're into the WotR (or medieval warfare in general) and haven't checked out the Society, do so!

I recommend Hawkwood, a manga about John Hawkwood and his career as a mercenary during the 100 year war.

http://fanfox.net/manga/hawkwood/v01/c001/1.html

18+? Sweet. Thanks!

Just a few days ago I read a book about Castagnaro.

[The Brain]

Just got a sweet shipment of stuff from the Lance & Longbow Society. Detailed booklets on orders of battle, participants, banners, and livery of the Wars of the Roses, and 2 CDs with the first 100 issues of The Hobilar. If you're into the WotR (or medieval warfare in general) and haven't checked out the Society, do so!

Addendum: the Hobilar stuff comes with great indices, so you can easily find the things that interest you.

[Habbaku]

Stop tempting me.

[Sheilbh]

Wolfson History Book Prize announced a week today in a Zoom, I think. The Shortlist looks fantastic - I've only read The Five so far (I am, sadly, low-key into the Ripper) which is excellent:

'The Boundless Sea:
A Human History of the Oceans'
David Abulafia

Allen Lane

For most of human history, the seas have been the main means of long-distance trade and communication between peoples – for the spread of ideas and religion as well as commerce. This tremendous book begins with the earliest seafaring societies – the Polynesians of the Pacific, possessors of intuitive navigational skills long before the invention of the compass – and ends with the giant liners and container ships of today, which still conduct 80% of world trade by sea.

In between, David Abulafia follows merchants, explorers, pirates, cartographers and travellers in their quests for spices, gold, ivory, slaves, lands for settlement and knowledge of what lay beyond. Avoiding as far as possible a Eurocentric approach, the book deals with the Atlantic waters before Columbus and shows how lucrative trade routes were created that carried goods and ideas along the 'Silk Route of the Sea' well before the Europeans burst into the Indian Ocean around 1500.

In an extraordinary narrative of humanity and the oceans, Abulafia shows how maritime networks grew from many separate localities to form a continuum of interconnection across the globe. This is history of the grandest scale, and from a bracingly different perspective.

'A History of the Bible:
The Book and Its Faiths'
John Barton

Allen Lane

This book tells the story of the Bible, explaining how it came to be constructed and how it has been understood from its remote beginnings down to the present. John Barton describes how the texts which comprise the Bible were written and when, what we know – and what we cannot know – about their authors and what they might have meant. Incisive readings shed new light on even familiar passages, exposing not only the traditions behind them, but also the busy hands of the scribes and editors who assembled them.

Tracing its dissemination and interpretation in Judaism and Christianity from Antiquity to the rise of modern biblical scholarship, Barton elucidates how meaning has both been drawn from the Bible and imposed upon it. Part of the book's originality is to illuminate the gap between religion and scripture, the ways in which neither maps exactly onto the other, and how religious thinkers from Augustine to Spinoza have reckoned with this. Barton shows that if we are to regard the Bible as 'authoritative', it cannot be as believers have so often done in the past.

'A Fistful of Shells:
West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution '
Toby Green

Allen Lane

By the time of the 'Scramble for Africa' in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for many centuries. Its gold had fuelled the economies of Europe and the Islamic world since around 1000 CE, and its sophisticated kingdoms had traded with Europeans along the coasts from Senegal down to Angola since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies – most importantly shells: the cowrie shells imported from the Maldives, and the nzimbu shells imported from Brazil.

Toby Green's groundbreaking new book transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa. A Fistful of Shells draws not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, on art, praise-singers, oral history, archaeology, letter and the author's personal experience to create a new perspective on the history of one of the world's most important regions.

'Cricket Country:
An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire'
Prashant Kidambi

Oxford University Press

'Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English,' it has been said. Today, the Indian cricket team is a powerful national symbol, a unifying force in a country riven by conflicts. But India was represented by a cricket team long before it became an independent nation.

Drawing on an unparalleled range of original archival sources, Cricket Country tells the extraordinary story of how the idea of India took shape on the cricket pitch in the age of empire. Conceived by an unlikely coalition of imperial and local elites, it took twelve years and three failed attempts before the first Indian cricket team made its debut on Britain's playing fields in the Coronation summer of 1911.

This is a tale with an improbable cast of characters set against the backdrop of anti-colonial protest and revolutionary politics. The team's captain was the embattled ruler of a powerful Sikh state. The other team members were chosen on the basis of their religious identity. Remarkably, two of the cricketers were Dalits. Over the course of their historic tour, these cricketers participated in a collective enterprise that highlights the role of sport in fashioning the imagined communities of empire and nation.

'The Five:
The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper'
Hallie Rubenhold

Doubleday

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.

What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.

Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become far more famous than any of these five women.  Now in this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie Rubenhold finally sets the record straight and gives these women back their lives.

'Chaucer:
A European Life'
Marion Turner

Princeton University Press

More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life—yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer's adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination.

[Habbaku]

'Chaucer:
A European Life'
Marion Turner

Princeton University Press

More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life—yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer's adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination.

I can't comment on any of the others, but I listened to a recent interview with Marion Turner on the History Extra Podcast and will definitely be buying this one at some point. She came across as extremely knowledgeable and had a lot of insight into the subject that lured me in. I can recommend this on the basis of that alone.

[The Brain]

Well he certainly wasn't a beggar.

[Sheilbh]

I can't comment on any of the others, but I listened to a recent interview with Marion Turner on the History Extra Podcast and will definitely be buying this one at some point. She came across as extremely knowledgeable and had a lot of insight into the subject that lured me in. I can recommend this on the basis of that alone.

I would really, really recommend The Five.

As I say I've read more than the odd book on Jack the Ripper ( ) and it's not often you come across a book that just utterly changes your perception of something, but she does it.

[Habbaku]

Wishlisted, at least. Thanks!

[Oexmelin]

Fistful of Shells is a great synthesis of a lot of research, past and ongoing - for those who are interested in the history of early modern West Africa.

[crazy canuck]

Fistful of Shells is a great synthesis of a lot of research, past and ongoing - for those who are interested in the history of early modern West Africa.

Heard the author being interviewed.  It is on my list 

[Maladict]

Wolfson History Book Prize announced a week today in a Zoom, I think. The Shortlist looks fantastic - I've only read The Five so far (I am, sadly, low-key into the Ripper) which is excellent:

Those first three and Chaucer are going on the list, thanks