The City-State in Europe, 1000-1600

The City-State in Europe, 1000-1600 by Tom Scott is an extremely fascinating book that examines an interesting part of European history, that of the independent or semi-independent city-state.

Curiously enough although the city-states were an important part of the development of the political fabric of Europe (some might argue that echoes of these institutions still reverberate through the fabric of society down to modern times) no detailed comparison of the city-state in the medieval period of European history was undertaken within the last 100 years.

Whilst it is true research work was undertaken (and quite detailed work, too) on their role as harbingers of the modern state, their great cultural achievements and the like, little regard was paid to what might be described as the 'bigger picture', as it were.

For example, their desires for territorial expansion, how they dealt with neighbours and other city-states and so forth.

In his book Tom Scott looks beyond the normal. He looks at lesser known city-states, he examines city-states of Switzerland and looks deeply into the imperial cities of Germany.

He examines how the city-states fitted in with the rest of the regions and nations in which they existed and how they co-existed with other city states.

He has views on how the city-states worked and how they developed through time which tend to disagree with some other experts. But his analysis is extremely compelling. 

He shows that rivalries between city-states could become fraught and how alliances came and went, sometimes over periods of time, sometimes rather rapidly.

Anyone who is a student of medieval European history needs a copy of this thought-provoking and compelling book. It is academically rigorous  and extremely well researched but it is written in a very approachable style.

It is published by Oxford University Press in hardback the ISBN is 978-0-19-927460-4. It is available form the That's Books bookshop.

Gunpowder, TREason or Plot, or How We Dug Up The Ancestors

Gunpowder, TREason or Plot, or How We Dug Up The Ancestors is a new book by respected historical writer Allan Frost.

But Gunpowder, TREason or Plot, or How We Dug Up The Ancestors tends to be a little more hysterical than historical.

In this fictional book, Tim Eason, (described as an unconfirmed batchelor!) visits Priorton in pursuit of a new lead on England's infamous Gunplowder Plot, he could not have anticipated just how close his relationship would become with the pub landlady, Sarah Brewer. But an elderly juke box in he corner of the bar seemed to have some sort of an inkling!

Nor did Tim quite realise that his research work would attract the attention of bungling conspirators Frank Fiddlit (a dubious solicitor), Tom Bleak (of Bleak Homes Limited) and Nevil Strubble (hapless Council Planning Officer).

Tim digs up enough information to attend a court hearing to determine ownership of Prioton Hall. However, Judge Sir Cedric Foot-Wart seems strangely preoccupied. Until an unexpected witness appears...

This somewhat explosive novel, set in an English town ignored by progress and time itself, will keep you intrigued and interested as its thickening plot and unforgettable characters interact.

You'll be chuckling from start to finish as farcical situation follows farcical situation!

This book is released via Amazon Kindle. You can buy it via the That's Books Amazon-powered bookshop. Just look for the Amazon Search Box to the right of That's Books.

'The Austerity Olympics' - When The Games Came To London In 1948

Janie Hampton's acclaimed The Austerity Olympics vividly depicts the last time the Games came to London. Her tales of teams ferried to events on double-decker buses, billeted in army camps and sewing their own kits are a world away from the lavish 2012 arenas and massive regeneration of Stratford East.

The 1948 London Olympics demonstrated what a fantastic Games could be organised on just £760,000 - and still make a profit. The main stadium was cleared of greyhound racing to allow great athletes such as Emil Zatopek and Fanny Blankers-Koen to thrill the indomitable Londoners who cheerfully overcame every obstacle, from food rationing to terrible weather.

Entertaining, revealing and highly-readable, this meticulously researched book is full of first-hand interviews, hilarious anecdotes, and spirited athletic feats. The Austerity Olympics is a fascinating book about an extraordinary event.

Published to coincide with BBC film based on the book - Bert & Dickie airing in May
Contains over 200 original interviews with entertaining anecdotes that make great material for review, extract and radio coverage.

Shortlisted for William Hill Sports Book of the Year

Janie Hampton has written over 15 books, from biography to fiction. She is the author of the critically acclaimed biography of Joyce Grenfell; and appears regularly on radio, in print and at literary festivals.

She is the leading authority on the social history of the Olympic Games in London and is Olympics Correspondent of The Oldie Magazine. She lives in Oxford.

The Austerity Olympics by Janie Hampton is published by Aurum Press on

20th February 2012 priced £8.99.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989

The Fall of the Berlin Wall The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 is a very interesting book. It is edited by Jeffrey A. Engel and is a collection of essays on the subject, written by people who are acknowledged as experts in their fields. Chen Jian, holder of the Michael J. Zak chair of history for U.S. -Chinese relations, Cornell University; Melvyn P. Leffler, Edward Stettinius Professor of American History, University of Virginia; Sventlana Savranskaya, director of Russia Programs, National Security Archive, George Washington University; James J. Sheehan, Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Modern European History, Emeritus, Stanford University; William Taubman, Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science, Amherst College.

Two of the most momentous events of the late 20th century were  the construction of the Berlin Wall, the other was the demolition of that same wall.

The erudite and well-argued essays examines how the Berlin Wall came to be removed all at once in 1989, and why nobody had foreseen this epoch making event.

The book details how the events of the days and weeks leading up to the fall occurred, how a frightened and desperate DDR leader Erich Honecker ordered his troops to open fire on the generally good natured but vocal crowds of demonstrators that were protesting against Honecker's autocratic rule. They declined to accept his order. Something that would have been utterly unthinkable, even months earlier. The party sacked Honecker and thus was the beginning of the end of not only the cursed wall. but of the entire DDR itself.

The book points out that these results came about as a result of the changes that had swept through neighbouring Poland and Hungary. Soon, revolt and revolution took not only the Communist Party of East Germany but also the rest of the Warsaw Pact member states.

The book looks at what happened next, and raises issues about what could happen in the future in this, the Post Wall period.

This book is a must have for any serious student of political or social history.

It is published by the Oxford University Press in paperback at $19.95.

Eminent Victorians on American Democracy, The View From Albion, by Frank Prochaska

What, exactly, DID eminent Victorians think of the American democracy?

In this likely and thought provoking book, Frank Prochaska explores how things looked in this fledgling democracy. Or rather, how they looked to outsiders, many of whom had firm views of how government should work in the modern, Victorian era.

I had hoped that the book would be a collection of essays, perhaps with notes and an explanation of  each essay, how the author of the book understood the eminent Victorian to mean.

However, the book in question is not that book. The author of the book tells the reader what HE thinks -for example- Bagehot, Mill, Bryce, etc., meant, rather than letting the eminent Victorians actually say it in their own words and allowing the reader to form their own conclusions. Guided with footnotes, etc.

It is a good book, but it could have been a great book. However, students of modern politics and of history of the Victorian era will find it eminently useful.

It is published by the Oxford University Press in hardback. 

A Journey Of Ascent By Andy P Weller

A sweeping historical novel spanning 350 years of a British family's history. To be published 27th January 2011

A Journey of Ascent: a gripping family saga tracing nine generations of a family from the sixteenth century to the Great War: 350 years of social revolution, agricultural and industrial transformation.

Andy Weller has masterfully rewrought the known facts of his long family history into a sweeping historical novel embracing the Reformation, the English Civil War and the Industrial Revolution, populated by novelists, landowners, smugglers, highwaymen, farmers and industrialists, all with one aim in mind: survival in turbulent times.

Weller has not rewritten history here: he has brought the reality of times past to vibrant life in a novel with huge appeal for anyone with an interest in English history from the perspective of the common man.

Andy Weller was born in 1954 near Little Chalfont in Buckinghamshire and first went to school in the very quaint village of Chenies. He became a career civil servant, starting as a clerk involved with the Concorde project. His later civil service career included representing the UK administration in Brussels and Geneva covering a wide range of trade policy issues, often working in partnership with UK business. He is currently working on his second book and lives in Pinner, Middlesex.

FACTFILE:
A true chronicle of early working-class life
One family's eventful route through British history
A fascinating personal journey through an author's family history

£17.99
Hardback

978-1-84624-649-4

Published by The Book Guild www.bookguild.co.uk  

Fiona Pardington: The Pressure Of Sunlight Falling By Kriselle Baker & Elizabeth Rankin (eds)

European explorers of the Pacific in the 18th and early 19th centuries faced a problem -- how to describe the people they met and report what they had seen and found. From Cook onwards, a serious expedition included artists and scientists in its ship's company.

An ambitious journey of the 19th century was the third voyage of the French explorer Dumont d'Urville, from 1837 to 1840. It was just before the invention of photography, when phrenology, the study of people's skulls, was the latest thing. D'Urville chose to take on the voyage an eminent phrenologist, Pierre-Marie Dumoutier, to preserve likenesses of people by making life casts.

When the expedition returned to France, the casts were displayed, and later stored in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, to be joined eventually by other casts from Dumoutier's collection, including those of the d'Urville and Dumoutier families. All were overtaken by photography and history. Fiona Pardington first learnt of the life casts in 2007, when a chance conversation initiated a four-year project.

It took her from Auckland to the Musée de l'Homme, as she researched and photographed some of more than fifty casts of Maori, Pacific and European heads, including casts of her Ngai Tahu ancestors. This book publishes these photographs and coincides with the opening of a major travelling exhibition. The photographs are extraordinarily beautiful, evocative and spiritually powerful images. They recover likenesses and revive the life force of Dumoutier's subjects, eliciting our empathy and fascination with a world we can never really know. This is a rich and engaging book.

With essays by leading scholars in Pacific history, art and photography, on subjects as diverse as phrenology and cast-making, the voyage, and the identity of the Maori casts, it will appeal to anyone interested in nineteenth-century encounters between voyagers and the peoples of the Pacific, or contemporary art and photography.

Dr Kriselle Baker is a freelance writer and curator. Professor Elizabeth Rankin teaches Art History at Auckland University. Previously professor at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, her writing has focused on retrieving the histories of neglected South African artists, and on sculptors and printmakers internationally.

2011 HB 9781877578090 £49.99

Otago University Press

Review of The Stonehenge Enigma

http://thatsbooks.blogspot.com/2011/06/new-book-reveals-startling-new-truth.html

It is an interesting book.

It is NOT a sensationalist book (despite the stupid illustration provided by the publisher to the press) the author is a qualified and practising archaeologist who has made a case for the theory that much of Britain at the time Stonehenge was built was covered in water (as a result of the impact of the Ice Age) he makes a reasonable case for this based on post hole evidence, plus other evidence found -and ignored or just not understood, in the main- by some archaeologists.

He believes that the people of the Stone Age were not the 'ignorant savages' as depicting in some history books, that they had reasonably high level of civilisation. (For which he has some evidence.) And that they were more mobile -by using boats- than might have been thought possible.

To anyone who wonders how it could be that a civilisation's influence could be so totally lost, he points out that within 200 years of the Romans leaving Britain, all of their building knowledge, etc., was lost and that it took a very long time for Britain to regain some of what Rome had. Central heating, for one thing.

There is evidence that they practised medicine and that an early use of part of Stonehenge was for medical treatments. He provides some evidence for this.

He also makes reference to Doggerland and points out that far from the tiny land bridge that some academics still seem to believe in, Britain was once part of mainland Europe, connected by the large landmass now called Doggerland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

It is an interesting book and worth buying. Even though the author should have employed someone to polish the text a little!

Watergate Exposed

How the President of the United States & the Watergate burglars were set up - as told to Douglas Caddy, original attorney for the Watergate Seven. Disclosing new factual material about the Watergate incident, this provocative exposé of the famed break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in 1972 reveals that the burglars were set up and explains how our historical consciousness has been altered to obscure the truth.

Written by a confidential informant, this never-before-told story rewrites the accepted truth of the scandal that rocked the political world and the entire nation while taking readers on a behind-the-scenes tour of a major criminal investigation.

Drilling to the core of the political nightmare, shocking acts of manipulation and deceit are uncovered as new light is shed on the players and puppet masters behind the event that led to the only presidential resignation in U.S. History.

FACTFILE:

Robert Merritt is a confidential informant for the New York Police Department's Intelligence Division. He has also worked for the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department, the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Marshals Service, the ATF, the Manhattan District Attorney, and the U.S. Attorney for New York City. He lives in New York City.

Douglas Caddy, LLD, is an attorney, the cofounder of Young Americans for Freedom, and served as the criminal lawyer for the burglars in the Watergate break-in.

193629611X (9781936296118) £16.99 Trine Day

www.gazellebooks.co.uk

African History a Very Short Introduction

African History a Very Short Introduction, is a book in the "a Very Short Introduction" series of books from the Oxford University Press.

African History a Very Short Introduction, by John Parker and Richard Rathbone is a very interesting book.

The authors themselves point out that their task would be a difficult one. After all, it is known, or widely accepted, at any rate, that mankind originated in Africa some time ago. Some experts say 6,000,000 years ago. So... a history on that scale would be a stupendous and most daunting task!

The authors ask many interesting questions. What, exactly, is history? Can the Westernised idea of what history is be transferred to Africa? The authors do raise the very interesting point about oral histories, which are an important part of the cultures of many civilisations, including those in Africa who still value the old ways.

The book also deals with the concept of slavery and wonders if, as part of the history of Africa, the history of slaves and their descendants living in -for example, America- should be included in the history of Africa? An interesting concept, which the authors do not take very far. When I read this point in the book I realised if this were to be taken literally, as mankind originated in Africa and then populated the Earth, surely the whole 6,000,000 years of the history of the world's population should be considered as part of the history of Africa?

The book, for its size, is profusely illustrated with photographs, drawings and maps, all of which are very helpful to bring them to life.

Sadly, what history is related is that of cultural genocide, greed, indifference, hostility from outsiders and problems caused by the interference of people who thought they knew best.

It is a thoughtful and though-provoking little work which will be idea for students of the history of Africa (both ancient and modern) and there is an extremely useful guide to further reading on the subject.

The book is £6.99 the ISBN is 978-0-19-280248-4.  

Horrible Histories the Mad Miscellany

Horrible Histories the Mad Miscellany is another of the excellent books in the Horrible Histories library of books.

The book is precisely what it says it is: A distinctly dotty sort of a book which contains many and varied pieces of historical facts and information.

The book is separated into 31 different sections. Although the last section is a disclaimer which points out several key facts, such as an item in the book that is, in fact, a fiction, not a faction (sorry...) and there is also a very handy index, too.

What do we learn from Horrible Histories the Mad Miscellany? That the Romans used entire packs of attack dogs, which were dressed in canine suits of armour and then let off to do battle. Now, I must admit, I hadn't known that!

There's a section on gruesome games. It also helpfully points out why Romans called foreigners barbarians. Which I think I'd heard before, but can't swear to it.

It gives a page to the Roman gladiators, with each different type of gladiator illustrated with a very helpful line drawing. For those of us who believed that a 'gladiator is a gladiator' the news that there were, in point of fact, twelve different types or classes of gladiators might come as something of a surprise!

Pirates and their parrots also get their own section, as do some rather remarkable pirate flags. Some like those of Calico Jack and Henry Every both being variations on the traditional skull and crossbones, looked rather menacing, whilst others (Black Beard, for one) looked faintly risible, to be honest.

Also included is a remarkable set of rules by which pirates lived. Apparently the musicians on pirate ships were allowed Sundays as a day of rest. (Who knew pirate ships had musicians?)

There are also sections on historical hangings, murders and assassinations including the somewhat unsporting way that the Vikings dealt with Edmund, King of England. Although not mentioned in the book, I believe they performed the Blood Eagle on him. (Just check it out on Google...)

There's also duels that were deadly or dull, or sometimes both, and duels involving duelling women.

Historically greedy people are listed and seems to include mostly Roman Emperors. Funny, that!

There's also a section on medical matters including the cure for the common cold from the Middle Ages which called for mustard and onions to be inserted in the nose.

There's also a section of historically interesting rhymes including one about the Kaiser, and one about the murderer Mary Ann Cotton.

The book costs £9.99 from the Scholastic Press (ISBN 0-439-96803-8).