Conrad's comments (member since Jun 29, 2007)

Conrad's comments from the Our History group.

How sad. May he rest in peace.

I love Robert Caro's bio of Lyndon Johnson. I've never read The Power Broker and am less than halfway through The Days of LBJ, but it's one of those series that I look forward to taking my time finishing over the course of my life. Caro hasn't finished writing the fourth and possibly final volume yet and (as Patrick indicates) he's notoriously thorough, so hopefully he and I both have plenty of time. Personally, I like Caro's approach, especially compared to McCullough, who I think ignored a lot of criticisms of Truman, preferring to write a work of hagiography. I liked Truman but you have to acknowledge its limitations, and its writer's - he has no problem with Truman's reactionary side that allowed the anticommunist demagogues to come to power.

There are a lot of great biographies of scientists out there, and while I fully sympathize with the skeptics who accuse biographers of Great Manism, it is at least a little subversive to return personal drama and all the ephemera of human existence to the story of scientific endeavor, hmm? I particularly liked Alan Turing: The Enigma. One of the challenges science biographers face is exposition of difficult theories, and Hodges is a real expert. Another great work of sci-bio is Shapin's A Social History of Truth, which is about the whole crazily productive crowd of 17th century English scientist-gentlemen, and is fortunately much less boring than it sounds.

I read accounts of the Holocaust every once in awhile, and my favorite so far is Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. How someone who was slowly starving and living under the most abject conditions imaginable managed to pay such close attention to the foibles of his fellow inmates is beyond me. It's very much worth reading, and it's also a great introduction to a (sometimes literally) fantastic writer, whose fiction unrelated to the Holocaust is also worth looking into.

Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem is not only her most accessible and a good book to read if you're not familiar with her; it's also devastating. Arendt set out to explore how it is possible for humans to commit acts of monumental moral blindness and then sleep at night. Her conclusions were controversial, here as well as in Origins of Totalitarianism, which illustrates the inception of Nazism and its ideology in vignettes and tighter brushstrokes than Eichmann. They are both worth reading, though Origins is very dense, very long, and contains much about the Soviets, Boers, and the Dreyfus Affair that may be of less interest if your focus is narrow.

Art Spiegelman's Maus might be the one I find the most moving, though. Anyone who's read it has probably gone through a couple copies, like I have, lending it to family and friends. Read it, read it, read it, I beg you.

Patrick, you're right, the Lapitans were the original settlers of Melanesia and parts of Polynesia and Micronesia.

Patrick, history makes up the better part of what I read, and I enjoy a lot of the same subtopics as you: 1 (though I much prefer Nixon, LBJ, and Kennedy, not FDR), 3, 5, 7, 15, and most of all, 14. I read a lot of labor history in college but now it bores the shit out of me.

I also like

(1) Anthropological studies of Lapitan and Melanesian, Polynesian, and Micronesian societies. I find it amazing that these people have done so much with so little. Most people aren't even aware that Lapitan culture ever existed, which is surprising, since they colonized a greater proportion of the globe than anyone else.
(2) The origins of early Socialism in Germany and France
(3) Russian history, 1800-1992, particularly the 1848 generation of intellectuals and the Bolsheviks/Mensheviks
(4) The pre-Revolutionary colonial period in the Americas - particularly the Seven Years' War
(5) Napoleon. 'Nuff said.
(6) The conversion of Northern European pagans
(7) Recent history of Islamic nations