Tag: history

Review – Murder: The Biography

Posted February 5, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Murder: The Biography by Kate MorganMurder: The Biography, Kate Morgan

Murder: The Biography is an interesting look at the history of murder, from the perspective of how different murder cases have changed the law (and how the law existing at the time impacted various murder cases). It’s written by a lawyer, but it’s accessible for the layperson, and Morgan remains keenly aware of how fascinating the topic of murder is to many. The details aren’t at all dry, but the back of the book contains details of how to find the relevant judgements, etc, for those who want to dig right into it.

For a reader of crime/mystery fiction, it has little to say about the fictional world (beyond a few comments that the bulk of murders are not like in books), just in case you were wondering — it focuses entirely on real-world cases, mostly things which helped to shape the law and other prosecutions. So we see things like the development of defences of diminished responsibility, and corporate manslaughter, through the lens of the events that prompted them. The latter law is still not really tested: the case of Grenfell, Morgan says, is a make-or-break moment for it, as you’d imagine.

I found it a really interesting read, and surprisingly quick. I wasn’t already aware of all of the murders, either. Just as a warning, there are a few really awful cases, such as the case of Dr Bateman’s negligence — skim that one if you’re a bit squeamish, and avoid the details.

Rating: 5/5

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Review – Buried

Posted January 22, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Buried by Alice RobertsBuried: An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain, Alice Roberts

Buried is a natural follow-up to Ancestors; I enjoyed the latter, but I enjoyed this one even more. Here it really is focused on burials in the UK, using mostly other burials in the UK as points of comparison, and Roberts chose some really fascinating sites to discuss.

My favourite chapter was one that I think some readers would find very difficult, discussing a cemetery of child burials — feotuses, neonates, and very young children, all buried together near the site of a villa, even some of them in a well-shaft. Roberts discusses why that may be with sympathy, pointing out that people of the period probably did care about their children; a lack of formal mourning in society does not, clearly, preclude the possibility of private grief. Burying children near the villa, instead of the cemeteries adults were interred in, may also be a sign of care — keeping the children close to the home, where children belonged, rather than sending them off alone to a place created for adults.

She also discusses cut marks on the bones of some of the tiny bodies. Often cut marks on bones are taken to mean cannibalism (usually on older bones than these, of course), but here she suggests it represents obstetric surgery, intended to help save a mother when a child was born in the breach position and nothing else could be done.

As in Ancestors, she also discusses the sexing of bodies, though I found it a bit hilarious that she talked about DNA evidence disagreeing with the physical examinations and then DNA evidence had to be brought into line with famously inaccurate — as she acknowledges — sexing based on things like the shape of the pelvis. I don’t quite understand how she can acknowledge that it’s hard to sex a skeleton, particularly a fragmentary skeleton, and then in the very same book talk about refining DNA evidence to ensure it 100% matches that. Surely the better course (and hopefully what really happened) was to look at cases where the two disagreed and re-test and look for clues about why they diverged, check for contamination, etc. The goal should not be — as stated — to have aDNA match a metric that’s famously inaccurate (and sometimes laughably self-serving).

The final chapter attempts to tackle a weighty subject, with mixed success: how much of changing trends through history was down to population replacement? She suggests a middle ground, which is fairly safe to say (extremes like “no population replacement” and “full population replacement” are easy to disprove) and didn’t, to my mind, offer up much to cut through the rhetoric.

Broadly speaking, though, I found this fascinating and absorbing.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The First Ghosts

Posted January 19, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Cover of The First Ghosts by Irving FinkelThe First Ghosts, Irving Finkel

This book is an incredibly detailed look at the written sources for some of the most ancient recorded beliefs about ghosts from Sumeria, Babylon and Assyria. It’s a little dense and difficult to read because it excerpts big translated portions (gaps in the text and all) before then explaining them at length — the context is needed to understand things fully, of course, but it feels pretty dry and academic, and (at the same time) it’s difficult to enter into his excitement about his theories because you have to rely on his word about the translations and the comparisons that can be drawn. Scholars in the field must have opinions on it, but the layperson can’t evaluate it — we’re only shown the evidence that supports Finkel’s conclusions.

A major quibble I have is with the author’s conclusion that if you don’t believe in ghosts, you clearly believe that either people who report ghost sightings are lying or mistaken about their own experiences, while the consistency of such reports and the frequency of them suggests that there must be something real there. I think he steps beyond his sources into personal speculation here, while leaning on all his amassed evidence as if it provides proof.

Try this explanation instead: something in the human brain pre-disposes us to have experiences which we interpret in this way. We can stimulate the human brain with electrical currents and magnets, creating sensations which aren’t there — and we know our own brains can produce waves of electrical currents in epilepsy and migraine. So there’s a potential mechanism for you: perhaps sometimes people see “ghosts” because particular experiences and physical states generate an electrical current in a certain part of the brain, producing sensations of things that aren’t really there. They’re then experienced as real and convincing (“I saw it with my own eyes!”), but aren’t.

We know migraine and epilepsy are not uncommon in the population, and we also know that they’re a matter of degree: they’re not on and off, but a spectrum of stimulation leading to a spectrum of presentations. So a large proportion of humanity could have some propensity toward that kind of thing (without having symptomatic epilepsy or migraine or restrict the group who can have these experiences to only people with clinical symptoms).

There. I’ve produced a potential explanation of why ghosts could be regularly reported which tallies with our knowledge of the human brain, which is more testable than Finkel’s hypothesis, and would explain the phenomenon. (It’s not perfect, it’s a little hand-wavy and I’m not actually a neurologist, it’s just an example of a line of investigation that could be taken up based on what we know about the human brain. And like I said, it’s testable.) I’m not saying it’s the truth; what I’m saying is that there are other hypotheses that don’t mean “everyone was lying or didn’t really have the experience they thought they had”. There are, in other words, possible explanations that mean they were all telling the truth and they did really have these convincing experiences that they could not tell apart from reality — they just misattributed the cause.

It feels ridiculous to have this big a pet peeve about it, but it’s very annoying to read a well-evidenced book, get to the end, and then the conclusion is “obviously, ghosts exist because people have always said so, there’s no other possible explanation!”.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Dinner in Rome

Posted January 12, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Cover of Dinner in Rome by Andreas ViestadDinner in Rome: A History of the World in One Meal, Andreas Viestad

For a history of the world, this falls a little short. The world looks very much like the Roman Empire here, except a couple of brief nods to prehistoric humans and what they ate. There are whole chapters that mention nothing but the lands previously included in the Roman Empire. I don’t necessarily blame the author for this — it’s his choice, of course, to pick a cuisine he knows, and to pick the particular dish he ate, but it’s quite possibly the publisher’s choice to give it a misleading title. “A history of Europe” might’ve been more accurate.

Which is not to say I disliked the book as a whole: I enjoy the idea of taking an ordinary, everyday thing — like a good meal in a restaurant in Rome — and digging into every aspect of it to find its history. Food is, as Viestad points out, absolutely essential to it, and many people and nationalities build identities around it. (Even erroneously, as he discusses in the case of pasta carbonara, which is not an ancestral Italian dish, but quite possibly a fusion of Mediterranean-style diets with the wants of American soldiers during World War II.) It’s an enjoyable endeavour, and I found reading it very soothing and enjoyable. I do like a good carbonara myself, and Viestad describes his beautifully.

I didn’t even find his autobiographical allusions annoying, because it is useful to see his experience of lemons in the context of his having farmed them and his nostalgia about the lemons on his little, commercially non-viable farm. It’s useful to get the flavour of the restaurant in general, the people, the way Italian diners behave — all of this is part of the picture he’s trying to build up, demonstrating the way food and how we treat food gets ingrained in us.

His sources are not explicitly referenced with numbered footnotes, but he does have a nice sources section (the temptation to call it “Sauces” passed him by) and in general I found it enjoyable: a relaxed history about everyday things.

Just… not a history of the world.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Hidden Hands

Posted June 10, 2022 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Hidden Hands by Mary WellesleyHidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers, Mary Wellesley

Hidden Hands is a book about manuscripts, and more than that, about the people behind the manuscripts. It’s not necessarily about the most beautiful or most impressive manuscripts, or the rarest, though it discusses manuscripts from all those categories. Wellesley isn’t just interested in the contents of the manuscripts, but also the people who composed the words, the scribes who wrote the actual script, the owners of the manuscript, and the potential readers of them.

I was familiar with most of the manuscripts mentioned, to the point where I’d have been interested in hearing more about the Pearl/Gawain manuscript or something for once, rather than the Beowulf manuscript yet a-fucking-gain. There were a couple of surprises too, though, like the discussion of the collection of letters from a particular family and how some of them were illiterate and thus the anxiety about the use of scribes. I’m not sure I’d normally count a collection of letters as a manuscript, but it was still an interesting section.

I also knew nothing about Gwerful Mechain, a medieval Welsh poet who wrote erotic poetry and protests against the misogynistic poetry circulating in her day. She was a definite and welcome surprise to me (as was the mention of a scholar who taught me, Katie Gramich).

All in all, I felt like there was so much to say that it would have merited a longer book, one which I would’ve read eagerly!

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Money: The True Story of a Made-up Thing

Posted January 15, 2022 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Money by Jacob GoldsteinMoney: The True Story of a Made-up Thing, Jacob Goldstein

Money: The True Story of a Made-up Thing is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s not an exhaustive history, or a manifesto for any particular path forward. Rather, it’s a series of stories about money in different time periods, which in aggregate tell us something about how money developed and how its been seen over time. It includes some really clear explanations of why the gold standard isn’t ideal, why the financial situation in Greece was a potential disaster for the euro, etc; it makes things which I thought were complicated sound really simple by breaking them down and demystifying them.

However, it’s worth noting that it doesn’t have footnotes. There are endnotes, which are not traditionally formatted but do point to some sources… but not nearly enough and not really specific enough to be able to say “ah, this assertion came from here, which I can read for myself”. It’s breezy and light and definitely intended for someone like me who is only very mildly interested in the topic, and it does well at being appealing for that audience. Others with more knowledge will no doubt find it shallow/overly-simplified/etc.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The Darkening Age

Posted December 31, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of The Darkening Age by Catherine NixeyThe Darkening Age, Catherine Nixey

The Darkening Age is a very readable book about a very depressing subject: the loss of knowledge, art and culture from the classical world when Christianity became mainstream. You often hear people saying that Christian monasteries preserved classical knowledge and literature, and it’s true — there are manuscripts which only survived because they were held in monasteries.

Unfortunately, as Catherine Nixey discusses at length, much more was destroyed by Christianity. Deliberately, purposefully, and with malice. Temples were torn down, books burned, inscriptions destroyed, etc, etc. If Christianity had truly been such a preserving force, we’d have a lot more than we do now, perhaps. Nixey goes through it step by step, the initial period of co-existence (and the fact that evidence suggests Christians were not persecuted nearly as much as they liked to think they were) and then the ramping up of hostilities, the sanctioned-and-encouraged utter destruction of “pagan” idols and temples, etc.

For such a heavy subject, it really is a very readable book, and I pretty much tore through it. It gets perhaps a bit repetitive, and other reviews are right to point out that there were other causes of the loss of texts, destructions of temples, etc.

The author is a journalist, rather than a historian, and the text is pretty much uninterrupted by footnotes/sourcing, so definitely be aware that it’s very much a popular history, and flavoured by opinion, rather than being an academic work. I found it an absorbing read!

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The Fate of the Ninth

Posted December 29, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of The Fate of the Ninth by Duncan B. CampbellThe Fate of the Ninth, Duncan B. Campbell

I’ve always been fascinated by the Ninth Legion, at least ever since I can remember, because of Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth (a story that I’m pretty sure was told to me until I could read it myself, though my mother liked Warrior Scarlet best). This is obviously less thrilling, since it’s non-fiction, and there’s a lot of detail about how the Roman army worked, etc… more than I could remember in one go, really: in some ways, I kinda just took the author’s word for it about the minutiae.

It did make me sad to learn from this book that the origin story of The Eagle of the Ninth is based on a wrong interpretation of an archaeological find– the eagle found in Silchester was more likely decorative, perhaps on a fort, rather than being the eagle of a legion.

Despite destroying the basis of a favourite book, I did enjoy this. It pieces together the story of the IX Hispana through the textual records they left behind — their stamps on tiles, the name of the legion on commemorative stones that discuss the careers of various Roman consuls and other officials — rather than through more exciting archaeology. If you’re not super interested in how Roman inscriptions can help date historical events, or the IX Hispana legion, it might not be of much interest, though! It’s a little dry for that.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – A Little Gay History

Posted December 27, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of A Little Gay History by R.B. ParkinsonA Little Gay History, R. B. Parkinson

This really is a little book, but it’s still interesting. It uses the British Museum’s collections (with a little bit of help from the British Library) to discuss how same-sex desire has been portrayed in art and literature. It’s not an exhaustive account, and many cultures leave no mark: I’d say it’s best viewed as highlighting some interesting objects (and some of the lacunae where we can’t say), rather than as any kind of complete narrative.

For me, there wasn’t a lot that I didn’t know about, or which surprised me if I didn’t, but it’s a good opportunity to get a closer look at the objects: the images are full-colour, and most pages enlarge some of the interesting details to take a closer look. The focus is on gay men, partly due to the limitations of any collection and the general invisibility of women in the archaeology of certain periods, but there are some references to genders outside the binary, and to portrayals of female same-sex desire.

It’s worth noting that quite a few of the images are explicit. In addition, some of them are Greek/Roman, so some of the men portrayed are teenage boys (since there were sanctioned and encouraged relationships between boys and older men).

Rating: 4/5

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Review – River Kings

Posted December 21, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of River Kings by Cat JarmanRiver Kings, Cat Jarman

River Kings touches on a few topics surrounding the Vikings that I haven’t read much about elsewhere: their role in creating and maintaining the slave trade, for one, and then a brief (but fascinating to me) reference to using bioarchaology to understand the spread of disease, including a theory that the Vikings helped to spread leprosy and smallpox. I’d love to read more about that (in pretty much any period, to be honest).

The format of the book is fairly simple: Jarman chooses an item from a dig in Britain, at Repton, and follows its path to where it may have originated. How did a carnelian bead make its way from the east to Britain? The story allows her to touch on a lot of topics along the way: first the Vikings’ presence in Britain, and then their raiding and trading in general, and then further back along the bead’s journey. She explores the customs and capabilities of the Rus (Vikings by another name), and their role in affairs in Constantinople and beyond.

It’s a pretty effective structure to explore a bit more about what the Vikings did and why. It doesn’t cover all possible topics, but nor does it limit itself too much. I found it pretty enjoyable.

Rating: 4/5

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