Scouring sources for good history books for the list of all-time great history books, I was looking at the New York Times reviews, of course.
The list from the Times of “notable” history books just for 2006 is lengthy, and impressive. (The paper thoughtfully includes similar lists back to 1997.)
What do you think, Dear Reader? Are some of them worthy of the All-time list? (Notice that The Worst Hard Time is included in the list.)
History books listed below the fold.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Timothy Egan wins awards for his reporting and writing on a regular basis these days, it appears. He was part of a 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter team who reported on racial attitudes in America for the New York Times. Last week his book on the Dust Bowl won the National Book Award for Nonfiction: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton-Mifflin).
This period is not well understood by Texas history students, according to the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) tests of the past few years. Here’s a new book that should be incorporated into lesson plans for 7th grade Texas history courses, who will be coming into the Dust Bowl period sometime after the first of the year on most calendars.
Egan reads an excerpt of The Worst Hard Time for NPR here, and the site includes a link to the first chapter and other NPR stories on the Dust Bowl.
Other sources for lesson planning for this period should include Woody Guthrie’s biography Bound for Glory (book and movie), Steinbeck’s series on the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath (both book and movie), and Of Mice and Men (book and movie and more movies).
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Looking for books to put on my ad hoc list of top history books, for giving or getting, I took at look at the list of Pulitzer Prize winners in the history category, a list of books that dates back to 1917. (You may make nominations for the list here — please do!) Prizes for the past dozen or so years are all books I liked and have found useful. Some of the books, like Acheson’s winner from 1970, grew to be classics in some circles. But I was struck by how many of the books seem to have sunk from view.
Where are they now?
Here’s the Pulitzer website for the prize itself, where you can find lists for all the prizes; I reproduce the complete list of winners in history, below the fold.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Gift-giving time beckons. Hanukkah, Christmas, Ramadan, Samhain, New Year’s Day — with a few exceptions, we will find ourselves looking for gifts for people we know and love, or people we know and work with, over the next few weeks. If you were to give a rather timeless gift, a book of history for the ages, what would it be?
I’m stealing ideas again, this time from Discover, the magazine that recently published its list of the 25 greatest science books of all time (that is a link to the introduction, written by Nobelist Kary Mullis; here is the list itself). (Tip of the old scrub brush to Larry Moran at Sandwalk, too.)
If you were to pick from a list of the greatest history books ever written, what would those books be? I hope you’ll share nominations for the top history books in the comments. Enlighten us to your reasons for picking the book, too.
Thinking out loud here: There would be a mix of old and new. Some books might be very short, some would be thousands of pages, perhaps in several volumes. I think a long-enough list would include some of these:
Well, any list I assemble solo would be a bit quirky.
What sort of criteria should be used to judge the books? Must they all be well-written? Should their effects on history and policy makers be considered? Should they be lyrical? I wonder, for example, about something like Homer’s Iliad. If effect on policy makers is a criterion, does the Bible qualify for a spot? Caesar’s diaries of the campaign in Gaul are famous, but who reads them any more? Do some books, or sets, make the list on the legs of the massive sales they racked up, partly because of a book club promotion (think Will and Ariel Durant)?
Make a nomination, please.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
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Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
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