Favorite "Micro-History" - e.g., Professor & Madman, Longitude, etc.

Cafe Society
1

There is a big trend in books to write about a specific event, item or person and put it/them in the context of their time. The books are typically shorter and the focus is on a page-turning accessibility. Part of me feels like I am compromising, but I do really like feeling like I am learning, while at the same time, these books are more satisfying than a lot of fiction (airport fiction is often too…bad, and current literature often tries too hard), and more accessible than big old stodgy non-fiction.

What are your favorites of this type of book? What should I add to my list?

The Professor and the Madman - read it, probably the best of this type of book - great story of the characters behind the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary

Longitude - also in the running for the best of this type of book - brings the search for a reliable way to chart longitude down to a practical perspective that I could relate to, making the search interesting and dramatic and providing a business perspective I hadn’t considered before

Galileo’s Daughter - by the author of Longitude. I liked the history of Galileo, but felt like the use of the relationship between him and his daughter was forced as a foundation for the narrative

Cod - fascinating history - I hadn’t realized how woven into our lives and history this fish really was - the author had clearly done his research. But the story was told over so much elapsed history that is was more like an extended magazine article or history lesson than an engaging story

Temperament - interesting education about how musicians arrived at Equal Temperament, but with today’s hindsight, it feels like the story could be told in a much more concise way than is related in this book.

Brunelleschi’s Dome - fascinating topic - the building of the dome in Florence, but somehow not as satisfying as Longitude or Professor…

How about others? I have heard about Salt (by the author of the book Cod), Mauve (about the discovery of the first artificial color dye), The Map that Changed the World (by the author of Professor and Madman). What would you recommend?

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Well, NOVA episodes rather than books (tho there may be books on the topics)

The sory of the prisoners building a glider to escape Colditz (sp?) Castle in WWII

The discovery of a “lost” U-boat found not far off the US coast. (Esp the part where the German U-boat historian says it can’t be boat X, but then they show him the engine plate)

I haven’t read it, but isn’t there a book tracing the history of Pi? (and various attempts to get its value)

Brian
The Endurance expedition

3

Isaac’s Storm – about the famous Galveston hurricane and the early days of the National Weather Service.

4

The Longest Cave - which explores the efforts to connect Mammoth Cave with Flint Cave is very good. Its an older book. I’ve owned it twice, read it twice, and don’t have a copy anymore because both of my got loaned out and never returned. (It used to be a bitch to find, too - you pretty much had to special order it - now there is the wonder that is Amazon).

Round Up the Usual Suspects is a look at the making of Casablanca. Very interesting if you are into film history.

5

I take it The Professor and the Madman is the same book as The Surgeon of Crowthorne with a different title. Great book. Try Keay’s The Great Arc (“The dramatic tale of how India was mapped and Everest was named”).

6

Yep - the Yanks got ahold of Surgeon, renamed it and marketed the heck out of the story, leading to bestseller-dom and other good things. Sometimes a little marketing ain’t so bad.

I’ll check out your recommendation - thanks.

7

I liked Contempt of Court: The Turn-Of-The-Century Lynching That Launched 100 Years of Federalism. It’s about a lynching of a black prisoner with the tacit consent of the sheriff. Because the underlying conviction was before the US Supreme Court on appeal at the time of the lynching, the Supreme Court held a trial and found the sheriff in contempt of court. It’s fascinating as both social history and as legal history.

In the same vein, there’s always Gideon’s Trumpet though that’s not exactly a recent book so I’m not sure if it fits in the discussion of the new trend of micro-histories.

I also enjoyed Killing Pablo by the author of Black Hawk Down. Killing Pablo is about the hunt for Pablo Escobar.

I really enjoy these “micro-histories” and hope the trend continues. I like reading general histories also, but I like reading about smaller events in the larger scheme.

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The Empire State Building* by John Taurog. Enough great data there to write a novel (which I did). The first two paragraphs will blow you away.

Gay New York is also fascinating.

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Cod is great. Salt is pretty good, but I actually preferred Tulipomania to either of those two. Most of the ones that have been mentioned I’ve read, and I’ve really enjoyed. But I really disliked The Potato: How the Humble Spud Saved the Western World. Has anyone read The Pencil: History of Design and Circumstance?

Another one that’s a forerunner of this trend is Thirteen Days. Focus on a very specific time period, there.

As far as books on pi go, there are several. I found History of Pi better than Pi in the Sky (which I hated).

I’m not sure why you feel like these books are cheating, WordMan. Just because they’re so enjoyable?

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Yeah, I hear ya, bristlesage, I should just enjoy. I guess part of me thinks/expects the learning part to be dry and boring or else effort has not been expended. Also, I am not sure how respected the works are - I always try to understand how the “micro-history” I want to read is regarded by academics in the field, but sometimes those reviews are available.

I feel that way about ancient history, too. I have not read Thucydides, Suetonius, Herodotus, etc…to get my info, but instead read some highly regarded modern fictionalizations - e.g., Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series, Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, and Graves’ I, Claudius. Part of me is really glad I got an overview of the time periods, but part of me wishes I read more of the source material - I just don’t have the time and focus to do so, y’know?

11

“are not available” darn it!

12

The Gangs of New York is a bloody amazing book.

I’m not being british, I mean it’s bloody and amazing. Pirates!

Grapeshot! Artillery fire at the corner of 8th and 34th! Mayors arrested! Hot sweet white corn!

The movie won’t have a tenth of it. The best part is… it was written in the twenties. Not too far from when it happened, a bit archaic in wordage, and… well, slanted Chicagowise.

13

I just read The Map that Changed the World. Worth reading for its portrait of “Strata” Smith and the birth of modern geology. Fascinating.

Right now I need to decide which of the books currently out on the mutiny on the whaleship Globe would be worth adding to my “to be read” pile.

Oh, and I fully recommend Cod to anyone.

14

bump

I thought I would give the thread a little more life - I have appreciated the recommendations I have gotten thus far and am hoping some of you other Dopers would offer some more.

CalMeacham?
Shibboleth?
Others?

Thanks again.

15

Not a book on one specific subject, but I’d recommend Banvard’s Folly by Paul Collins. It’s a collection of thirteen short biographies of people who had big ideas but failed. Or on a similar note, Andreas Schroeder’s three collections; Scams, Scandals, and Skulduggery, Cheats, Charlatans, and Chicanery, and Fakes, Frauds, and Flimflammery, all collections of famous frauds and hoxes.

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The Victorian Internet, about the development and impact of the telegraph, is another thumping good read.

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Oh, man, The Pencil is one of the best books I think I’ve ever read! It got me turned on to Petroski and I’ve read a bunch of his other stuff, but none of it compares with this one!

The amount of information he packs into each page is amazing, but what’s so surprising about the book is how hard it is to put it down. And it’s about pencils.

The Island of Lost Maps is another great one, too.

18

In much the same vein as Longitude and The Great Arc, I realy enjoyed Edwin Danson’s Drawing the Line , about surveying the Mason and Dixon line. Apart from telling a good story, the author covers both the legal background and some of the math involved.

As popular math books go (not sure they count as “micro-histories” in the meaning of the OP, but I see several books about pi have already been mentioned here), I’d recommend Eli Maor’s E: The Story of a Number and Paul Nahin’s An Imaginary Tale (a brief “history” of the square root of negative 1).

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If you have access to CSPAN, you may want to catch a few episodes of “Book Notes.” The authors of many of these books ahve been on that show discussing their works. It is also a great place to get the heads up on new books in a similar vein.

20

I thought Simon Singh’s books on Fermat’s Theorem and on code-breaking were excellent and very well written.

OTOH, I didn’t like The Professor and the Madman at all. I thought the whole story could have been covered by a magazine article, and that the book ended up throwing in pages of boring crap just to fill out the length. So many of these books have the same problem. The summary that they use to sell the book really is fascinating. But there just isn’t that much more interesting detail to tell, so the actual book suffers. I should note that this trait makes them adapt very well to one hour documentaries.