Ooh, I can do history!

• Zealot by Reza Aslan - This is both a life and times of Jesus of Nazareth and a history of how the early Christian faith changed after his death.

• Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond - As big-picture as you can get for history. This examines cultures and cultural contact not through “better” or “worse” but through their environment and the technology levels they derived from it.

• For more big-picture history, Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies is a history of about 30 European countries that have been lost to time; The Great Sea by David Abulafia is a history of the Mediterranean Sea and deals a lot with trade routes and cultural contact points; and The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan is a global history that contextualizes everything from the Romans up with an Asian, mostly Middle Eastern and Central Asian, focus.

• There’s also John Romer, who’s written A History of Ancient Egypt Volumes I and II. His goal is to strip all the Western cultural baggage out of Egyptology and focus on the bare facts, and while he doesn’t always succeed, it’s still very illuminating.

• Eric Larsson writes really interesting, rich narrative histories of terrible people and times and I think he’s probably the best narrative historian going. I’ve read The Devil in the White City, about H.H. Holmes and the Chicago World’s Fair, and In the Garden of Beasts, about the American ambassador to Berlin during the rise of Hitler. Next for me is Dead Wake, about the sinking of the Lusitania.

• At Home by Bill Bryson is an eclectic history of Western domestic things, like light bulbs, windows, furniture, household pests, and gardens. You get a little bit of a lot of things and are guaranteed to learn something.
  

• I’d also like to recommend A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, though it’s better classed as memoir or travel writing. When he was a late teen in the ‘30s, he walked the length of Europe relying on the kindness of strangers, and as a wiser adult, wrote about the experience. He draws on all kinds of historical and cultural references to give more context, is exceptional at describing people and places, and basically provides a time capsule back to a Europe not broken by WWII.

Enjoy!

May I add? :) These are just some of my favourite books on history:

• Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners
  
• Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy
  
• The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
• Born Survivors
• The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors
• Titanic: an Illustrated History 
• Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia 
• From Cradle to Crown: British Nannies and Governesses at the World’s Royal Courts
• The Romanovs: Love, Power and Tragedy
• The Last Romantic: A Biography of Queen Marie of Roumania 
• Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy
  
  

may i add :) these are
just some of my favourite
books on history:

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