Grand unified books thread

[garbon]

I'm reading "When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World" by Hugh Kennedy.  I enjoyed his "The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In".

[Syt]

I saw Vanished Kingdoms and it seemed like a weird kludge.

Thanks for the heads-up, I will seek out additional info before buying it.

[ulmont]

I saw Vanished Kingdoms and it seemed like a weird kludge.

Thanks for the heads-up, I will seek out additional info before buying it.

It's not bad - I'm about halfway through.  A number of the "kingdoms" were long long long forgotten though, such as the Roman British kingdoms in England.

[garbon]

I saw Vanished Kingdoms and it seemed like a weird kludge.

Thanks for the heads-up, I will seek out additional info before buying it.

Oh I mean I didn't read it thoroughly, just looked at it in a bookstore. As I flipped through it seemed similar to one of those king/queen biography books that just has a small chapter about each entry piece. To me I couldn't really understand how such a diverse group of nations should be in the same book just because they happened to have been in "Europe"

So on no account am I saying not to read it, just that it seemed rather odd to me as a work from my short look over it.

[Syt]

Gotcha.

Well, from a review I read it picked European states that "disappeared" from large to small and seemed to have a decent amount of oddities about them which is generally something I like.

[jimmy olsen]

I'm up to Book of 9 of Jordan's Wheel of Time.

You guys probably all hate it but I don't care, you are all snobs.

The ending of book 9 is fucking awesome.

Book 10 is slow and not much happens, but book 11-13 are some of the best in the series.

Once someone else took a stronger hand in it yes.

Jordan wrote book 11

[jimmy olsen]

Anyone read this book, or War Before Civilization? If so, what did you think?

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2003/aug/16/20030816-105047-3673r/print/

CONSTANT BATTLES: THE MYTH OF THE PEACEFUL, NOBLE SAVAGE

By Steven A. LeBlanc, with Katherine E. Register

St. Martin's , $24.95, 271 pages. illus.

REVIEWED BY KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE

Prehistoric warfare is a topic that matters very much today because it has the ability to tell us a great deal about the human condition and even the human future. The nature and extent of warfare deep in our tribal past can help throw light on whether human beings are a fundamentally warlike or peaceful species. If the human condition has always been bound by warfare then a pessimism about the prospect of changing this and an investment in a heavily armed nation state would be the rational choice.

But if human nature is ultimately peaceable then it makes more sense to be optimistic, to believe all disputes can eventually be resolved nonviolently, and to work for an international order dedicated to negotiation and conciliation.

It is no secret that Western society is today radically divided by these assumptions, between Americans from Mars and Europeans from Venus. Moreover, most Western countries are themselves internally divided along similar lines, between pessimistic, hard-headed conservatives and optimistic, soft-hearted liberals.

Given the importance of the topic you would expect it to have attracted an enormous amount of debate among those who study prehistory. Yet Steven A. LeBlanc's new book "Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful Noble Savage" is only the fifth major study of the issue to be published in English in the past 100 years. In fact, in all that time, Mr. LeBlanc is only the second author to unequivocally argue that, for most of its existence, homo sapiens has waged almost constant war on its own kind and that primeval society was far more warlike than any of its civilized successors.

Mr. Le Blanc's sole predecessor was Lawrence Keeley who revolutionized this debate in 1996 with an extraordinary work, "War Before Civilization." Mr. Keeley used archaeological evidence to show that prehistoric villages in both Europe and North America had almost all been constructed with fortifications and that a high proportion of the skeletal remains of their inhabitants showed they had been killed by weapons of war: spears, arrows, swords and clubs. Prehistoric massacre sites were common.

Mr. Keeley used anthropological studies to show that in most remaining tribal societies, whether Amazon Indians or New Guinea highlanders, comparative fatality rates from war were four to six times higher than even the worst experienced by modern nations, such as Germany and Russia in the 20th century. In tribal society, warfare was a recurring, annual, even seasonal occurrence.

Mr. Keeley's work was an academic treatise with all the scholarly paraphernalia of references, bibliography, tables and graphs. Mr. LeBlanc has taken the same message and tried to pitch it to a wider, more popular audience. For my taste, this Harvard archaeologist was mistaken to adopt a folksy prose style and a lot of personal anecdotes. Most readers of books like this are well-educated people who actually prefer footnotes and properly-sourced citations. The author would have been better served by erring on the side of a more rigorous presentation and by grounding more of his claims in the literature of the academic journals.

He has also made a mistake in including a chapter analyzing warfare among chimpanzee bands. Chimp culture is so far removed from that of humans -- we had a common ancestor millions of years ago but humans are not descended from chimps -- to make the comparison largely irrelevant.

Nonetheless, anyone who reads Mr. LeBlanc in conjunction with Mr. Keeley will find the two a persuasive combination. Together they show there can now be little doubt that as far back as we have credible archaeological and anthropological evidence, human beings have inhabited not a realm of peace but a world of war.

Mr. LeBlanc's book makes one valuable contribution to the debate. He addresses a question that remained a yawning gap in Keeley's work: whether hunter-gatherers have been as warlike as tribal villagers. Mr. Keeley lumped both together under the category of primitive or tribal society. However, for at least 95 percent of the past 200,000 years, humans were hunter-gatherers.

Agriculture -- even the most elementary kind such as that still practiced in New Guinea -- is a comparatively recent invention, less than 10,000 years old. Tribal villagers who tend gardens have an obvious need to defend the plots in which they have invested their labor and on which their very ability to survive depends. Hunter-gatherers, on the other hand, are mostly nomadic people with fewer territorial imperatives. If challenged by rivals, they can usually move on to more congenial locales. On the face of it, villagers and nomads should have quite different propensities to go to war.

Mr. LeBlanc devotes a chapter to this issue with a detailed analysis of three hunter-gatherer populations for which there is reliable evidence: the !Kung bushmen of south-west Africa, the Eskimos of arctic America and the Aborigines of Australia. The picture that emerges of these nomads (or foragers, as Mr. LeBlanc prefers to call them) is little different from that of more sedentary agriculturalists. "From the earliest foragers found archaeologically to historical accounts of foragers from all corners of the globe," Mr. LeBlanc writes, "the evidence shows that they fight and kill in deadly earnest."

For instance, archaeologists working on the Saunaktuk Inuit site on the Beaufort Sea, in the Northwest Territories of Canada, have recovered the remains of many women and children that show violent death and dismemberment. In Arnhem Land in northern Australia, a study of warfare among the Murngin people in the late-19th century found that over a 20-year period no less than 200 out of 800 men, or 25 percent of all adult males, had been killed in intertribal warfare.

Since the 17th century, a great debate has raged within Western culture about the original condition of humankind. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that in the state of nature life must have been miserable, brutal, ignorant and short. Only with the advent of civilization did people come to enjoy comfort, peace and longevity. A century later, the French Enlightenment's Jean Jacques Rousseau turned all this on its head, arguing that the first humans lived in simple happiness, at one with the natural environment. Civilization was a corruption of this idyllic golden age, a falling from grace.

Both perspectives were entirely speculative. Neither Hobbes nor Rousseau ever made an empirical investigation of the real world of tribal societies. Nonetheless, their analyses subsequently exercised a powerful hold on the Western mind.

Among intellectuals in the humanities, especially those drawn to the field of anthropology, the radical optimism of Rousseau has long held sway. Right up until the present, the majority of anthropological studies of primitive societies have been conducted on assumptions derived from the French Enlightenment's disdain for the burdens of civilization.

Even Mr. LeBlanc cannot shake himself free of this tradition. He concludes his book with the hope that his study of this topic will, in some unspecified way, contribute to the eventual elimination of warfare. The very work he has produced, however, is an effective antidote to Enlightenment romanticism. It is, in fact, a powerful confirmation of the world view of Thomas Hobbes and his pessimistic realism about humanity's perpetual predilection for violence.

Keith Windschuttle is an Australian whose books include "The Illing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Out Past."

Read more: Enduring myth of 'noble savage' vs. a species at continuous war? - Washington Times

[sbr]

I finished two books in the last week, bringing my total for the year up to ... about 2.

"Theodore Rex" was very good but I think I preferred the Rise a bit more than the story of his Administration.  I am going to order the third book soon, hopefully I can get through it faster than the 9 months this one took.

"Lunatics" by Dave Berry and Alan Zweibel is one of the funniest things I have read in a long time.  Blurb:

Philip Horkman is a happy man-the owner of a pet store called The Wine Shop, and on Sundays a referee for kids' soccer. Jeffrey Peckerman is the sole sane person in a world filled with goddamned jerks and morons, and he's having a really bad day. The two of them are about to collide in a swiftly escalating series of events that will send them running for their lives, pursued by the police, soldiers, terrorists, subversives, bears, and a man dressed as Chuck E. Cheese.

Very funny and hits some international and US current events.

[Darth Wagtaros]

I'm up to Book of 9 of Jordan's Wheel of Time.

You guys probably all hate it but I don't care, you are all snobs.

The ending of book 9 is fucking awesome.

Book 10 is slow and not much happens, but book 11-13 are some of the best in the series.

Once someone else took a stronger hand in it yes.

Jordan wrote book 11

Editing.

[Syt]

Currently reading "The Inheritance of Rome - Europe 400-1000" from Penguin's History of Europe series. I like the author's attempt to try to look at the events and developments from the perspective of people at the time (did their decision make sense at the time), and trying to limit the hindsight evaluation.

So far, the book is nowhere near as gripping as The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 from the same series (Penguin History of Europe).

This sentence made me LOL, though:

"One example is Felix's Life of Guthlac, a saint's life of the 730s, which depicts its Mercian aristocratic saint as having been the leader of a war-band in his youth in the 690s, 'remembering the valiant deeds of heroes of old', who razed the settlements of his enemies with gay abandon and accumulated immense booty before changing his ways and becoming a monk."

[Maladict]

Currently reading "The Inheritance of Rome - Europe 400-1000" from Penguin's History of Europe series. I like the author's attempt to try to look at the events and developments from the perspective of people at the time (did their decision make sense at the time), and trying to limit the hindsight evaluation.

So far, the book is nowhere near as gripping as The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 from the same series (Penguin History of Europe).

This sentence made me LOL, though:

"One example is Felix's Life of Guthlac, a saint's life of the 730s, which depicts its Mercian aristocratic saint as having been the leader of a war-band in his youth in the 690s, 'remembering the valiant deeds of heroes of old', who razed the settlements of his enemies with gay abandon and accumulated immense booty before changing his ways and becoming a monk."

I've yet to start on Pursuit of Glory, but I though Inheritance of Rome was really good.

Currently reading A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Hugely impressed, already ordered his other major works.

[Ed Anger]

I'm delving into the deep dark world of free Baen Books. This week, Better To Beg Forgiveness...

The theme? UN bad. Fat people...stink! Socialism bad. Third world societies bad. Foreign Aid..bad! PMC's Good! Americans Good!

The book isn't that bad. For being free.

[Darth Wagtaros]

Ah yes, in recent years Baen has been overtaken by rabid libertarian types.  Their books are political rants disguised as sci-fi novels.

[Eddie Teach]

I'm delving into the deep dark world of free Baen Books. This week, Better To Beg Forgiveness...

The theme? UN bad. Fat people...stink! Socialism bad. Third world societies bad. Foreign Aid..bad! PMC's Good! Americans Good!

The book isn't that bad. For being free.

I read the first chapter of a free e-book about the Sith. Didn't draw me in, would rather spend my time watching crap on youtube/netflix and posting crap on Languish.

[Razgovory]

Ah yes, in recent years Baen has been overtaken by rabid libertarian types.  Their books are political rants disguised as sci-fi novels.

That describes a lot of sci-fi novels, for a long time.