Similar to What Are You Reading (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=514.msg14196#msg14196) but for reading non-fiction. What have you been reading? Would you recommend it or not?
Today I read cover-to-cover my last book of 2022, James Boyce's Imperial Mud: The Fight For the Fens.
Long story short, I think it's really good and compellingly written. In particular looking at the role of Imperial ideology in the draining of the fens, and taking an unashamedly pro-Fenland view of the situation, are interesting to do, and the work he does looking at customs and views over time is really worth reading. He works well at exploring the connection between people and land, and making it clear that these relationships are developing, immediate, and human rather than static eternities simply ruptured by a single Imperial encroachment. I also like the way that he emphasises the importance of resistance in slowing things and allowing people to adapt, something I think is easy to miss for historians used to working back from the endpoint of certain processes.
I'm not sure I agree with all of it: he very much frames the Fenlanders as being in the position of an Imperial subject, indigenous people, and whilst I think there are strong parallels to take that are worth exploring, in my view he somewhat underplays the way in which displaced white people from Britain could be footsoldiers and architects of Imperial power abroad, and the differences in experience between Fenlanders and the ways in which other Imperial subject peoples were racialised. I think my other caution would be on the extent to which he sometimes overplays the longue duree of Fenland custom, especially the evocation of 'pagan' as an idea when discussing early modern continuations of traditions which I'm not sure is easy to justify given how relatively little time the book spends on the medieval fenlands, something that could probably have done with another chapter. I'd also have liked to see a bit more on traditions and culture generally to add some depth to the claims about community and the presentation of premodern community as very essentially un-individualist which Boyce sometimes brings up as quite a stark assumed contrast.
All told anyhow, definitely a really good read and one I'd happily recommend.
Today I finished a book that wasn't for work! Again! That makes, uh, two this year. Eep.
This one was The Lady In Gold, written by US journalist Anne Marie O'Connor about the tortured history of Gustav Klimt's painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, tracing it from the roots of intermingled Viennese elite families in the early decades of the 20th century, many of them Jewish, into the Nazi art thefts of the 1930s and early 1940s, and then through Austria's slow and never truly completed reckoning with its fascist past. It's very well written and deserves its many accolades, managing to mostly draw one through a hugely entangled cast of characters without skipping a beat and with surprisingly few times when I lost the thread of who was who. The things the book does very well include its portrayal of the horrifying complexities and choices some of its subjects were pushed through, humanising a dehumanising period of history very effectively. It also manages to keep the pace of a very human narrative despite a long time span, though at some cost in over-streamlining the story. The very human nature of the narrative is no doubt why it captured minds so well and got adapted for a very star-studded 2015 film.
At times it's possibly too well written, with figures and twists becoming a little heightened in the narrative. As a couple of examples, journalist Hubertus Czernin is given sole credit for revealing Austrian president Kurt Waldheim's past in the Nazi military, at the expense of other figures, notably Alfred Worm who does not get an appearance at all. Other elements are made to hit harder: we are introduced to Austrian socialist and politician Karl Renner attending socialist salons with Adele Bloch-Bauer in the 1910s, but his support for the Anschluss and stonewalling on recompense for displaced Jews are treated as shocking betrayals for characters who would have known him personally - in fact his anti-semitism was apparently pretty well known.
Its read on some of the issues of Austrian self-reflection ring fairly true to me as one of today's non-Austrian Viennese, though I think there might have been more to explore there. I wonder if some self-reflection from an authorial standpoint might have helped too at times: O'Connor turns up herself in the narrative very abruptly with no real explanation for her own presence, with the later sections of the book being interwoven interviews where her own position vis-a-vis the story is treated as an unspoken and unexamined axiom. Because of the nature of the story, it almost has to be an outsider's tale of Austria, and that's probably partly why I enjoyed it so much, but there's also something very American indeed about the narrative and not necessarily in a self-aware way. The coverage and engagement with questions around the art market that ultimately snapped up many of the Klimts and whisked them out of public hands is limited, and it's hard not to feel that America is seen as almost a neutral endpoint, a place where restituted art can be disposed of or displayed away from the tortured backstories and of a Vienna that she portrays as largely still failing to grapple with its past demons, its angels having long since gone.
A final thing I noticed, perhaps worth mentioning, is something rather inherent to an art story, namely that it is mainly a story of the high-end elite and the artisans they patronised. O'Connor is happy to examine the bonds between these people and those of lower station, but the latter group of people rarely speak directly into the narrative. The society bigotries of some characters are treated as foibles rather than symptoms of a wildly stratified society struggling to justify itself: the factories and businesses of its industrialists and barons are rarely examined for the impact they might have had outside the rareified circles of high culture Vienna. This is not, I think, irrelevant to the core of the story, one of whose questions is around how much the art restitution is an important symbol of general restitution for the crimes of fascism. Some more engagement with what displaced and broken Jewish families who did not have sizeable art collections to be stolen in the first place thought of it all might have helped set the story in context usefully.
Overall, the book should definitely be seen as a streamlined chain of events for a good narrative rather than the sort of analytical history that tries to properly discern why events followed as they did. With that said, it's a fascinating mine of information and a very good read on a very difficult bit of history, and I felt I learned a lot from reading it, so do recommend.
Time to revive this thread (I should read more non-fiction)
I read The Dragon Throne, by Jonathan Fenby. It's a history of China focused on the Emperors specifically, and it's... alright? It was interesting, certainly, and included a lot of new stuff for me by simple virtue of my not knowing Chinese history.
On the other hand, there are some oddities. The book could definitely have done with better editing - it repeats itself rather oddly in a number of places, bringing back a topic a few paragraphs after it was already dealt with in ways that feel like the thought process is going round in loops.
I think it also suffers a little from trying to tell the story of China's history through a lot of people who honestly aren't always very interesting and didn't always have a strong connection to major events. The structure is by dynasty rather than by individual so it often feels like the focus is off the Emperors - which is fine, but then it begs the question why the book is based around centring them. It could also, as a book for casual Western readers, have done with more maps to help visualise what was actually going on.
I suspect there are better introductions to Chinese history, I picked this one up cheaply as an impulse buy and it's a fine quick read from which I learned things, but it's also probably not the book I'd have chosen if I had shopped around more.
I read The Medieval Persian Gulf, by Brian Ulrich. It was interesting!
It's in the Arc Humanities Press Past Imperfect series which is about having short guides to the latest research on particular topics. This is the first one of these I've read and if they're all this quality I should definitely read more of them.
I think this one was really good - it runs from the start of Islam up to around 1500, giving a solid guide to the different political and religious players in the region. The Gulf is a pretty diverse region, and especially in the early medieval period significant bodies of Christians, Zoroastrians, and Jews all played a large role in local trade. Later, even as these receded, the differences between different sects and schools of jurisprudence remained rather more complicated and fluid than ideas reading back from today (when broadly speaking Iran is Shia and the Arabian states are Sunni, both hardline variants thereof) often allow for.
My main issue - and it's a me problem not one with the book - is that I did not get a proper education in Islamic sects and traditions, so beyond some of the basics I am still re-learning some of the distinctions every time I read a book like this. I definitely need to read this a second time at some point to get the distinctions down better! I could perhaps at a couple of points have done with some extra diagrams and maps, for example to help visualise some of the politics or the construction of ships being described, though it's understandable not to have those in something very much intended to be a small book.
There are also just interesting stories throughout, which keeps a good balance between lively sketches of life and big-picture stuff. Merchants who got rich off the pearl trade and became governors, city-states aggressively using their navies to control trade, sales of horses where the traders intentionally gave poor animal care advice to ensure their marks would need to buy more in future, and so on. There's some useful stuff on the physicality of it all, too: I hadn't really thought about space on merchant ships much, and the idea that the most desirable option on a fairly flat-decked ship involves basically putting a tent up on the deck makes a lot of sense. One port in the fifteenth century was described by a Chinese visitor as having rainbow-like colours in its red and green rocks, and an Islamic traveller noted that "Merchants of the seven climes... and all the lands of the Orient... bring to that town precious and rare commodities made glittering by the sun, moon, and clouds and which can be transported across the sea. Travellers from everywhere in the world come there..."
That port was Hormuz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormuz_Island). It's pretty strange to think about what it must be like living there now.