"The Last Duel" by Eric Jager (2004)

"The standard field for judicial combat was a flat rectangular space measuring forty by eighty paces, or about one hundred by two hundred feet."

Eric Jager is a Professor of English at the University of California.  To date he's written four books on medieval topics.

The (far more interesting) 2021 film by Ridley Scott notwithstanding, The Last Duel is a straightforward work of history detailing a dispute between two nobles in late 14th century France over the supposed rape of one noble's wife.

If you're arriving at this book from the movie it will probably bore you to tears.  Where the movie crackles with dramatic tension the book is a much slower, much more chronological exploration of the same event.  And even though the nature of the rape itself is called into question by various historical sources, none of the other events described in this book are matters of conjecture, to the point where this book seems like a foregone conclusion from the outset.

I can only blame the marketing department.  Medieval history is one of my favorite subjects, but having been led to this book by the movie, I was sorely disappointed by its contents.  Even lacking any dramatic impact, I think the book could have been a more enlightening (if you'll forgive the pun) venue for a wider understanding of the time period in which it's set.  As it is it's fairly pedestrian, and it lacks the wider, more scholarly viewpoint of other works that delve into the same time period.

Related Entries:

"The Hundred Years' War on Palestine" by Rashid Khalidi (2020)

"Korea: The Impossible Country" by Daniel Tudor (2012)

"Graveyard of the Pacific" by Randall Sullivan (2023)

Three Books by Two Bass Players

"Korea: The Impossible Country" by Daniel Tudor (2012)

"Seoul Metro stations are full of advertisements showing happy multicultural families, and in particular, dutiful Southeast Asian wives who seemingly enjoy cooking Korean food and studying the Korean language for the benefit of their grateful husbands.  The aim of these poster campaigns is to increase social acceptance of such women, by portraying them as warm, somewhat subservient (and thus non-threatening), and as near Korean as possible.  In the long run, this will probably have to change..."

I've been to South Korea twice.  My first visit was in 2002, when I joined a guided tour of Seoul, the DMZ and Odaesan National Park.  My second visit was last summer, when I spent a couple days walking around Incheon with my family.

I was very unimpressed with South Korea the first time I visited.  In 2002 our super sketchy tour guides took us to some of the least interesting places and worst restaurants Seoul and nearby localities had to offer.  The weather, the food and the people were all rubbing me the wrong way, and remember being glad that the multi-day tour ended as briefly as it did.  I enjoyed Odaesan National Park, but that was, up until this year at least, my one good memory of South Korea.

2024 was a much better trip.  Last August we visited sans tour guides, checked ourselves into a homestay not far from the airport, and walked around the Unseo area, enjoying two meals before boarding our connecting flight to Taipei.  It was, aside from getting lost on our way to the homestay, a very good two days, and I left Korea thinking about returning next summer.

Hence my purchasing this book at the Incheon International Airport.  It was written by a British writer whose primary contributions to the West's understanding of South Korea consist of articles published in The Economist.  According a blurb on the back cover, he lived (or has lived) in Korea "for a number of years," where he also manages a brewing company located in Seoul.  His Wikipedia page only details his exploits up to this point, so I can only assume this information remains current.

His account of Korean history, culture, economy and related topics is what you'd expect from a book of this type.  It's written for a Western audience, it refrains from saying anything too controversial, and it's been fact-checked thoroughly.  There are some typos in the text that really shouldn't be there, but overall it seems, to me at least, a solid guide to a country that I'm not that familiar with.

From my perspective as an American who's been living in Taiwan for over 24 years now, it's unfortunate that the author overlooks Taiwan in many of his discussions of how South Korea compares to other countries and cultures across the globe.  As fellow "tigers" South Korea and Taiwan have had very similar histories, and it is often this very similarity that puts them at odds in economic terms.

All of the above said, this book has increased my resolve to revisit South Korea next summer.  I think there's more to South Korea than what meets the eye, and the less obvious aspects of this country merit further exploration.

Related Entries:

"Graveyard of the Pacific" by Randall Sullivan (2023)

Three Books by Two Bass Players

"The Naked Ape" by Desmond Morris (1967)

"Black Hawk Down" by Mark Bowden (1999)

"The Silk Roads" by Peter Frankopan (2015)

"There is more going on, then, than the clumsy interventions of the west in Iraq and Afghanistan and the use of pressure in Ukraine, Iran and elsewhere.  From east to west, the silk roads are rising up once more."

Peter Frankopan is a Professor of Global History at Oxford University.  At the time of writing he's written one other book: The First Crusade: The Call from the East.

The Wikipedia entry for this book is, by the way, awful.  The criticisms expressed there are valid, but someone needs to add a better synopsis and revise the Reception section.  I'd do it, but hey, I'm doing this!

So what's The Silk Roads about?  Put in simple terms, it claims to be "a new history of the world" in which the middle east is repositioned at the center of world history and politics.  This of course makes a certain amount of sense if you venture far enough back into Antiquity, into the time when Greece and Rome contended with the might of the Persian Empire.  It even makes a certain amount of sense if you move forward from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, and from there to the years just after the First World War, when countries were scrambling to secure supplies of oil.  But I'm not sure if it works for every time period, especially considering how various empires and caliphates in the region inevitably crumbled over time.

I'm also not sure that it works for the modern era, given the state that some middle eastern countries are in today.  Then there's the fact that the author adds and subtracts China from his equations in the most arbitrary manner.  He's very positive in how he views China's role on the world stage (when it suits his arguments), but the picture he paints of that country is extremely selective.  The closing chapter of this book is also, to put it charitably, wildly optimistic in how it views what seemed like a middle eastern resurgence in 2015.  Things in China aren't looking so rosy now, Israel's bombing the hell out of Palestine, and Russia's still mired in its invasion of the Ukraine, so... what were we talking about again?

It's a decent survey of the region's history, but it's funny how even the author can't seem to stick to his own topic.  At certain moments he can't help but jump into the history of Europe and North America, a fact which undermines his argument that what was happening in the middle east, during the same time period, was what was most important.

There's not much in The Silk Roads that you won't remember from any survey of World History class, but I did learn a few interesting tidbits.  I doubt I'll read the author's other book, but this book, given its size, was fairly easy to get through.

Related Entries:

"The Winter Fortress" by Neal Bascomb (2016)

"Chip War" by Chris Miller (2022)

"To Rule the Waves" by Bruce D. Jones (2021)

"2034" by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis (2021)

"The Light Ages" by Seb Falk (2020)

"According to that theory, the eye emitted visual rays, sent out to collect information from the objects they encounter.  The problem with its reverse, the intromission theory, was that if light came radiating in all directions from all points on an object, when those rays hit the eyeball they would be hopelessly jumbled -- how could the eye possibly make sense of them?"

 

Seb Falk is a historian at the University of Cambridge.  He's published several articles on medieval astronomy, and The Light Ages is his first book.

 

In The Light Ages the author discusses the development of science and technology in the medieval world, with particular emphasis placed upon astronomy, his area of concentration.  In addition to astronomy he also discusses astrology, medicine, theology, philosophy and other disciplines.  He attempts to frame all of these topics within the life of one monk, John of Westwick, who lived and died just before the Renaissance began in earnest.

 

Oh, and how's your trigonometry?  Sections of this book are very mathematical, particularly those dealing with the medieval calendar and contemporary understandings of how celestial bodies move around one another.  If your trigonometry is rusty, parts of this book are going to be difficult, and if your eyes glaze over at discussions of azimuths, meridians and declinations it's going to be even worse.  For my part I think that I soldiered through it well enough, though I can't say that my efforts were rewarded.

 

But my main issue with this book isn't the math but rather the framing device.  At the close of the book John of Westwick remains an enigma, and attempts to relate events of the time to his comings and goings seem to have ended in failure.  His life was simply too remote from some of the people and events described in this book, and an attempt to condense a time period that lasted hundreds of years into a single person's lifetime was probably doomed from the outset.

 

I'm sure there are better books on the subject, and for this reason I wouldn't recommend The Light Ages.

 

Related Entries: 

 

"IBM and the Holocaust" by Edwin Black (2001)

"Move: The Forces Uprooting Us" by Parag Khanna (2021)

"The Narrow Corridor" by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (2019)

 "Extreme Economies" by Richard Davies (2019)

"The Chinese in America" by Iris Chang (2003)

"The anti-Chinese backlash engendered much soul -searching and debate within the Chinese American community.  The late 1990s and early 2000s saw endless, frantic discussions on how to prove one's loyalty to the United States, or whether to confront these attitudes with organized protests.  Some immigrants began to blame themselves for being too complacent - for immersing themselves in their careers and families, and not braving the risks of participation in affairs of the larger world.  On Internet chat groups and in public forums, they openly questioned whether they had been giving the right message to the next generation.  Was it, perhaps, short-sighted to discourage their children from careers in the media and the arts, careers that could influence public perception of Chinese Americans, in favor of the more anonymous fields of science and technology?  Could the putative security offered by such fields have been nothing more than an illusion?  Were they wrong to warn their children to avoid politics?  Could their own memories of repressive regimes in Asia have nudged them toward a safe haven of political apathy in the United States?"

Iris Chang is a Chinese-American author.  She began her career as a reporter, and later switched to the writing of history.  She has won numerous awards, and her most famous book is probably The Rape of Nanking, which I read some time ago.

The Chinese in America starts where you'd expect it to start: in America in the 1800s.  It then moves to a snapshot of Ching Dynasty-era China at the same time.  From that point on it advances through the history of Chinese Americans decade by decade, stopping to examine The Chinese Exclusion Act, racism against Asian Americans during World War II and more recent, racially motivated acts against Chinese Americans.

The author writes well, and with a fluid command of her subject that precious few historians possess.  Some of the typos I encountered near the beginning of this book were slightly embarrassing, but that's not something I can hold against the author.  Her arguments are always predicated on both facts and the ideals upon which the United States is, or at least pretends to be, built.

I can't say this book was consistently fascinating, but overall it's very good.  The most interesting thing about it is the interactions between American and Chinese governments.  In The Chinese in America one sees that these two countries have developed in tandem, and the modern history of China is in many ways also the modern history of America.  The labor shortages, economic upheavals and political changes in one nation were constantly effecting the other, and a kind of feedback loop developed over time.  

It's in some ways easy to see the Chinese immigrants building the Trans-Pacific Railroad as cut off from their country, but the reality was something more complex, more subtle.  I think The Chinese in America does a good job of illustrating this human relationship between the two countries, even if this relationship isn't always at the forefront of the discussion.

Compared to The Rape of Nanking, a book that's bound to provoke more extreme reactions among readers, The Chinese in America is, I think, much better.  In this book the author shows that she can write history in the absence of racially-charged atrocities, and that her understanding of the subject exceeds what's usually supplied by propaganda.

Related Entries:

"The Candle in the Wind" by T.H. White (1958)

"The Ill-Made Knight" by T.H. White (1940)

"The Queen of Air and Darkness" by T.H. White (1939)

"The Sword in the Stone" by T.H. White (1938)

"The History of the Jews" by Paul Johnson (1987)

"Hence when the ghetto walls fell, and the Jews walked out into freedom, they found they were entering a new, less tangible but equally hostile ghetto of suspicion.  They had exchanged ancient disabilities for modern anti-Semitism."

Paul Johnson is an English historian and politician.  He's known for his conservative views.  Many years ago I also read his Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830.

The History of the Jews, as you might expect, starts in antiquity and ends in the late 80s, when this book was published.  It's divided into seven sections, which are: Israelites, Judaism, Cathedocracy, Ghetto, Emancipation, Holocaust and Zion.  Zion, which closes the book, describes how the state of Israel came to be.

I was familiar with most of the theology, thinkers and historical incidents presented in this book, though there were a couple surprises.  If you've taken a course (or read a book) on the development of religion in the ancient world you'll probably feel the same way.  I didn't find much of interest in this book until the last two chapters, these dealing with the Jewish dilemma during and after World War II.

In terms of style I have nothing bad to say about Paul Johnson.  He can be plodding at times, but he states his arguments clearly and offers a lot of supporting evidence.  This was even more the case in The Birth of the Modern, which I found to be the more insightful of the two books.

My one complaint about this treatment of Jewish history is that it felt like it needed another chapter: Diaspora.  Outlining the history of Jews in lands beyond the Middle East, the United States and Europe would have added another dimension to discussions of both the Holocaust and Israel, and would have also made the book as a whole feel more relevant to a wider number of readers.  To some extent the author does do this in the Zion chapter, but his analyses of more remote Jewish communities are very brief, and obscured by a more statistical approach to the subject.

Related Entries:

"The Bridge Over the Neroch and Other Works" by Leonid Tsypkin (2012)
A Smattering of New Age Theosophy

"Why the West Rules - For Now" by Ian Morris (2010)

"An all-out East-West war would, of course, be catastrophic.  For China it would be suicidal: the United States outnumbers it twenty to one in nuclear warheads and perhaps a hundred to one in warheads that can be relied upon to reach enemy territory.  China tested an antimissile missile in January 2010, but lags far behind American capabilities.  The United States has eleven aircraft carrier battle groups to China's zero (although China began building its first aircraft carrier in 2009)* and an insurmountable lead in military technology.  The United States could not, and would not want to, conquer and occupy China, but almost any imaginable war would end with humiliating defeat for China, the fall of the Communist party, and perhaps the country's breakup."

Author Ian Morris is a Professor at Stanford University, specializing in (Western) History, Archaeology, and the Classics.  He was born in the UK, and has written three other books. 

The Good: As a survey of world history this book isn't terrible, but it does leave A LOT out, and tends to oversimplify historic episodes that are critical to its thesis.  The Opium War, for example.  Or the development of various methods of government in post-WWI China.  At times the author's lack of knowledge with regard to his ill-defined "Eastern core" is glaring, but he does a decent job of presenting major world events in chronological order.

The Bad: When the author writes about the West (or, in his terminology, "Western core") and the East (the Eastern core), what is he writing about, exactly?  As he would have it, the Western core developed from an agricultural heartland referred to as the Hilly Flanks, while the Eastern core developed from an agricultural base between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers.

But what about India?  And what about the incomplete nature of the archaeological record, and the fact that the West has been so much more thoroughly excavated than the East?  What about the fact that sites within the Fertile Crescent would tend to be better preserved than those in the East, an area which presently nurtures large populations and has a much shorter history of archaeological survey?

I'd have to say that India was what really stuck in my craw the whole time I was reading this book, especially given the fact that India's population is poised to overtake China's in the near future.  How do you write a book like this and manage to overlook an entire subcontinent?

And then of course there is the question of what it means "to rule."  Is it really just a question of having a higher standard of living?  Is it the number of territories you control?  The worldwide popularity of your culture, and the ideas it produces?  If we are to take the title of this book is its central thesis, from the very beginning it fails to explain what it is setting out to prove: in short, what it means to rule, and why such a quality of rulership is desirable.

The Ugly: As a guide to current and future events, this book is a disaster.  It says almost nothing about the current state of East-West relations, and the author hedges his bets so much with regard to predictions that this book just about makes itself irrelevant.  All of the praise for this book - located conveniently inside its front cover - was either written by people whom the author has praised (and sited) in the book itself, or by those who haven't bothered to read it straight through.

But you need not only take my word for it.  You can read Ricardo Duchesne's great interview of it here. 

*In case you somehow missed the news, that creaky, Soviet-designed Chinese aircraft carrier is now operational.

On a side note, this book reminded me why my study of History stopped at the undergraduate level.  As a work of scholarship this book is dismal.  I'm sure that Professor Morris has failed students for work that was both more rigorous and more thought-provoking than this steaming pile of crap.
 

"One Summer: America 1927" by Bill Bryson (2013)

"Nothing, however, was stranger than that it became the avowed policy of the United States Government to poison a random assortment of citizens in an attempt to keep the rest of them sober"

Bill Bryson is an American historian living in Britain.  He has written many books, among which "A Short History of Nearly Everything" is probably his most famous.  This is the first of his books that I have read.

As the title indicates, this book describes the summer of 1927 as it transpired in America.  The author has of course supplied some background for the events of this summer, but the majority of events in this book fall between May 1927 and September 1927, with a short epilogue outlining the subsequent failures and successes of notable individuals.

Of all these notable individuals, Charles Lindbergh stands as the most noteworthy person alive in 1927.  It is his transatlantic crossing which kicks off the book, and the intense, almost unimaginable level of fame he achieved afterward spans the entire summer.  In an age of supersonic aircraft and space travel, Lindbergh's immense fame might be hard to understand, but he was indeed a very big deal during that fateful summer, now 87 years past.

Other events from summer 1927 are described in rich detail, among them Al Capone's rise to prominence in Chicago, the now forgotten sash weight murders, the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, the arrival of Prohibition, the discovery of television and "talkies," and other related events, too numerous to list here.  I particularly enjoyed the parts illustrating the eccentricities of Henry Ford, the popularity of eugenics, and Lindbergh's later fall from grace.

"One Summer: America 1927" is a captivating book, written in an almost flawless manner.  My only complaint is that it contains a bit too much baseball trivia, though this fault can certainly be excused on the count that baseball was, in 1927, a very national pastime.  Reading about Babe Ruth's sexual indiscretions was interesting, but I've never been a big baseball fan.

I enjoyed this book very much, and I'm sure I'll be reading Bryson again.