I’m looking for some good history books, particularly ones about off-the-wall subjects or events. Any and all eras of history are open (except war, unless it’s a really really good book!)
I love Stanley Loomis’ trilogy on the French Revolution: The Fatal Friendship (a dual biography of Marie Antoinette and Axel Fersen), Paris in the Terror, and DuBarry. All written, I believe, in the 1960s, but still easy to find.
For “Off the Wall” subjects, you can’t do much better than Charles Panati . He writes books on the history of things you never wondered about before but reading them you find them fascinating.
Irving Wallace wrote several books about sidenote people in American history that were very good. Most of them are out-of-print now but easily and economically found through half.com or at other used book stores. They include:
BARNUM (self explanatory)
THE TWENTY SEVENTH WIFE (a biography of Ann Eliza Webb Young, the final wife of Brigham Young who “divorced” him in a sensationalized trial in the 1870s)
THE TWO (a dual biography of Chang & Eng Bunker that is incomparably superior to the awful novel by Darin Strauss that somehow became a bestseller)
INTIMATE SEX LIVES OF FAMOUS PEOPLE which isn’t quite as scurrilous as the title implies but is basically a series of 3-4 page accounts of the private lives of famous people.
The works of James Burke , most famous for CONNECTIONS, THE DAY THE UNIVERSE CHANGED, and THE AXEMAKER’S GIFT, are great histories of technology and its butterfly effects. Carl Sagan’s COSMOS, newly available in DVD, is also a must-read for history as well as for science.
Anything by Barbara Tuchman. She has the unique gift of making non-fiction read like a real page-turner without dumbing it down or sensationalizing it.
I second the Barbara Tuchman recommendation.
Also, if you don’t have anything against graphic novels, Factoid Press has an ongoing series of comic compilation books called The Big Book Series… which all well researched and focus on various “off the wall” historical and cultural topics.
I personally recommend “The Big Book of Thugs”, “The Big Book of Weird Wild West” and “The Big Book of Vice”.
Unfortunately I can only find an Amazon link to them, but it will give you a starting place:
Big Book Series
Emm most of my library?
Okay off the wall you say:
A Mind of its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis by David Friedman. Just finishing it right now.
A Few Bloody Noses: The Realities and Mythologies of the American Revolution by Robert Harvey
Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly
Sex, Dissodence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages by Jeffrey Richards
Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling andBrunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance genius Reinvented Architecture both by Ross King.
James Burkes’ books are fun to read and very quirky. Not quite as humerous as watching the videos, but a good read anyway.
:smack:
And how could I forget:
Lies My Teacher Told Me, Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W Loewen.
Let me second Barbara Tuchman, I really enjoyed A Distant Mirror. And third or fourth James Burke, especially the earlier works: Connections & The Day the Universe Changed
Twilight of the Old Order by Claude Manceron. Visit Pre-Revolutionary France and get to know the Marquis de Sade, Beaumarchais, Marat, Mirabeau, and the Chevalier d’Eon like old friends!
The Dream and the Tomb by Robert Payne. Nonfiction about the Crusades written with a novelist’s eye for prose and detail. Absolutely fascinating.
When Time Shall be no More and Messianic Revolution. Both focus on various cults that have believed in the imminent arrival of the Apocalypse based on Biblical Prophecy. Highly entertaining and informative.
ITR champion those two sound like they would fit in very nicely with what I am reading right now! Thanks! I haven’t read it but Norman Cohn’s book The Pursuit of the Millenium might be something you’d like. Its on that same subject.