Tag: history

Review – Tutankhamun and the Tomb that Changed the World

Posted March 28, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Tutankhamun and the Tomb that Changed the World, Bob Brier

I’ve been fascinated by ancient Egypt since I was a kid, like many people. One of the books that fed that interest when I was a teenager was Bob Brier’s The Murder of Tutankhamen, so I was intrigued to get this and read about his current take on the state of Tutankhamun studies. I also knew he said some things people found controversial and unnecessary about Howard Carter (highlighting what appeared to be thefts from the tomb), which… I was curious about, and not too surprised about.

Brier writes engagingly, and there’s a lot of fascinating stuff. I did find it not always entirely clear when a theory was considered solid or not — sometimes he’d report a recent theory and say that this and that were found on experimentation, and give all positive-sounding evidence about it… and then sort of step back and say well, we can’t trust that evidence. It’s probably easier to digest if you discuss both the positives and the negatives all in one go! (In particular I found this with the chapter aDNA testing on the mummies to establish familial relationships. Brier sounded like he was behind their conclusions, at least to me, and then in the next chapter mentioned how obviously it couldn’t be true.)

It’s definitely an interesting update both on the understanding of Tutankhamun and on Brier’s understanding of Tutankhamun, especially if you read his popular book, which suggested that Tutankhamun was murdered, when it was current. He’s completely disavowed all those theories now, but makes brief reference to them here.

It remains a popular book and biased, I think, to the author’s specific interests and view of the world. For example, he repeatedly conflates disability with frailty, which may or may not be true (someone with a club foot may still be fairly hale in other ways, for example). He’s very keen to portray Tutankhamun a certain way, and it’s important to remember that Brier is not neutral (no one is) in those interpretations. Some of this stuff we just don’t know, and is very difficult to know now thanks to the poor condition of Tutankhamun’s body.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: Bob Brier, book reviews, books, history, non-fiction

Review – Blue Jeans

Posted March 13, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Blue Jeans, Carolyn Purnell

This is a sort of non-fiction I really like — something that focuses on an everyday object and unpicks it. Here it’s blue jeans, and goes into the colour, the garment, how they became combined, and the fashions around them and perceptions of them. Parts of it, like the creation of indigo, I already knew about, but it’s different to have the facts marshalled together like this and get a really clear view on how the creation of synthetic indigo has led to huge pollution from the jeans industry.

Carolyn Purnell writes well and clearly, and without personal anecdote getting too much in the way — rather, the glimpses of her personal opinions and her family’s history with jeans helped to illuminate the topic.

I really enjoyed it.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Carolyn Purnell, history, non-fiction

Review – Tutankhamun’s Trumpet

Posted March 9, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Tutankhamun’s Trumpet: Ancient Egypt in 100 Objects, Toby Wilkinson

I love this style of history, selecting objects and focusing in on what they tell us, and I was hugely into Ancient Egyptian history when I was a teenager (obsessing in particular over Christine Desroches-Noblecourt’s book on Tutankhamun). So it’s no surprise that I really enjoyed this in a partly nostalgic way.

Unlike some other books of this type, it doesn’t explicitly mention at the start of each section which object is being discussed. Sometimes the object introduces the history that Wilkinson wants to explore; sometimes there’s a description of the state of affairs too, and then Wilkinson brings in the object that illustrates that from the tomb. Sometimes the object is mentioned rather glancingly, which is somewhat disappointing: I love it when historians and archaeologists really focus in and look at the object as an object as well as a symbol of hundreds of years of history.

Overall, I found this enjoyable, and despite eagerly reading many books both specifically about Tutankhamun and more generally about Ancient Egypt, I definitely found new information and (perhaps even better) new interpretations here. I’m reading Bob Brier’s Tutankhamun and the Tomb that Changed the World right now, for example, and he only mentions the usual theory that the tombs of many past pharoahs were looted by robbers and their mummies rewrapped and rehidden by the state “to protect them from further desecration”. Wilkinson instead mentions state-sanctioned looting in Ramesses XI’s reign to fund General Paiankh’s campaigns — something I don’t recall reading about anywhere else before.

Definitely got on better with this than A World Beneath The Sands, which bodes well for the other Wilkinson book I have on my TBR pile.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, history, non-fiction, Toby Wilkinson

Review – Fever Season

Posted February 27, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 3 Comments

Fever Season: The Story of a Terrifying Epidemic and the People Who Saved a City, Jeanette Keith

My interest in this book was mostly from a scientific perspective, rather than the historical, but it seems that there weren’t many scientific takeaways from this epidemic — or at least, this book isn’t interested in discussing them, though it briefly mentions that there were scientists and doctors in Memphis during the outbreak who tried to get what information they could.

Fever Season is more a historical chronicle, an attempt to draw together eye-witness accounts and historical events and make a record of the suffering and death the city suffered, with some nods to how that later influenced Memphis’ growth as a city. Keith writes with quiet sympathy for the major players, identifying the people who stayed, who did their best to combat the suffering. The discussion of the nurse Kezia DePelchin in particular is very sympathetic, showing her sadness, the ways she suffered as an onlooker.

It’s a fairly dry narrative, all the same, and it assumes at least some pre-existing knowledge about Memphis and the political situation in the US in that period. Nothing a bit of Googling couldn’t teach me, but that and the dryness made it heavy going in some ways.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Jeanette Keith

Review – Agrippina

Posted February 7, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore, Emma Southon

I really enjoyed Emma Southon’s book on murder in Ancient Rome, so I was eager to pick this up. I didn’t know much about Agrippina to begin with, beyond the most common stories, so it took some work to orient myself to her family tree (and of course, with the way that Romans only had about two names available per family so it sometimes feels like everyone is called Julia or Agrippina). Once oriented (with the help of Southon’s explanations and supplementary material), it’s quite the story: Southon sees Agrippina as a very capable woman who tried to do things not considered suitable for a woman in her context, and nonetheless being fairly successful, on the whole.

Southon’s tone is irreverent, as in her other book, and that might put off people who are looking for “serious” history. Despite that, and the lack of direct sourcing, Southon makes it very clear when she’s speculating and what she thinks is possible, what she thinks is likely, and what she thinks is a certainty. Don’t let the tone fool you: she’s really quite careful about that, and many historians are not (or not always). Southon outright tells you that she’s imagining what Agrippina might have done, and based on what; other authors will look at the possibilities, pick their favourite, and present that as what happened because it’s what they think happened.

Southon’s book is pretty sympathetic to Agrippina, where generally I’ve seen her treated very critically, and she does good work in revealing where that came from and why. Overall, Agrippina was an enemy I wouldn’t have liked to make — and one who got the things she wanted from life, even if they then killed her. Southon’s interpretation is striking and refreshing.

I did actually find it a bit slow going at times, despite that, but I don’t think that’s the fault of Southon, or of the material. This just didn’t feel as fresh as A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum — despite Southon’s irreverent tone, it’s still a biography, and those can kinda drag for me.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Emma Southon, history, non-fiction

Review – Murder: The Biography

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

Murder: 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

Tags: book reviews, books, crime, history, Kate Morgan, non-fiction

Review – Buried

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

Buried: 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

Tags: Alice Roberts, archaeology, book reviews, books, history, non-fiction

Review – The First Ghosts

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

The 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

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Irving Finkel, non-fiction

Review – Dinner in Rome

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

Dinner 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

Tags: Andreas Viestad, book reviews, books, history, non-fiction

Review – Hidden Hands

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

Hidden 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!