Lessons From History Biographies

  Never be too certain your side is the right one.     I have read so many Lincoln-themed books now--with more waiting on my shelf!--that every time I read one I wonder if I will be able to find a new lesson to take away from it. Needless to say, I am not quite familiar with the details of his life and the major events surrounding it, and few Lincoln books these days really offer radical new discoveries. Nonetheless, he's a much more pleasant historical figure to spend time with than some of the others I have recently (I seriously never need to read a Hitler book again). Every Lincoln book tends to have a different area of focus, and Meacham (an excellent and acclaimed historian) intriguingly focuses on Lincoln's religious journey of discovery. To what extent Lincoln was seriously religious is debated to this day; he started his life as something of a skeptic, and while religious iconography seeped into all his later speeches, historians still debate how much of a "conver...

  Be careful who you hitch your wagon to. Writing this blog out on my phone because my laptop alas won’t work properly in this hotel room I’m currently in, so apologies to my readers if this format is funkier than normal! Stacy Schiff is a prolific historical writer (some of her more recent excellent works being studies of the Salem Witch Trials and Samuel Adams), but 2010’s Cleopatra: A Life  might be her most iconic book, having stayed on bestseller lists for years after its release. I only recently managed to catch up with it, courtesy of my local used paperback book store; I had avoided it for so long because I’ve never been all that interested in the subject matter, and it was only after loving some of Schiff’s other work that I decided to give this one a try. I was quite glad I did, because Cleopatra is a fascinating portrait of a woman desperately trying to maintain an empire on its last legs, and inadvertently dooming it in the process. Cleopatra’s story is an historic...

  Hatred and intolerance is a disease that only destroys.     Prior to catching up with Laurence Rees' amazing 2017 book The Holocaust: A New History , it had been a good 15 years or so since I had read a book solely devoted to the topic of Nazi Germany and/or the atrocities committed in its name; there are people who can't get enough of such historical studies, but I find them uniquely dark and terrible works that have the power to depress me indefinitely. Rees' book is a vital work that should absolutely be read by everyone, while at the same time I wouldn't mind taking another 15 years off before I revisit the subject again. There are a variety of serious historical lesson to take away from the crimes of the Holocaust, and all too many people learned the wrong ones from it (one popular modern version: the Holocaust was a uniquely horrible and unforgivable historical crime [which is definitely true on some levels], and that means no other crimes could ever be compared...