Bear Flag Blog

The Burning Land by Bernard Cornwell - 7/10

Another enjoyable story in Cornwell's Anglo-Saxon series. Nothing to write home about, and Cornwell really stretches credulity in the way he returns Uthred to the side of Wessex, but a fun read nonetheless.

Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different by Gordon S. Wood - 8.5/10

I have read enough of Gordon Wood's opinions - he critiques history books for the New York Review of Books - to know that he is, shall we say, crotchety. Surly. Grumpy. Persnickety. I suspect I might be too, were I in an academic discipline where deconstruction and "political correctness" are so very much run amok. That said, he's also damned well-informed about early American history, and this collection of character portraits of the founding fathers is both concise and horribly interesting. I think he really drives home the understanding that the Founding Fathers were men of a very different era than the one they gave birth to. These character sketches are a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the men who shaped this country at its inception.

My favorite quote, which was good enough for Wood to use it twice in this book, is from Ben Franklin, writing about John Adams: "I am persuaded that he means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses."

I'm looking forward to reading Woods' contribution to the Oxford History of the United States series, the recently released Empire of Liberty; it's already receiving excellent reviews.

Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 by John Huxtable Elliott - 8/10

An interesting book which compares the British experience in the New World with that of the Spanish. Aside from starting a century earlier, the Spanish essentially became overlords of two large, existing cultural entities (the Incas and the civilizations of central Mexico), whereas the English started later and their relations with the natives were those of neighbors (frequently bad ones) rather than overlords.

The book delves much deeper, of course, although the scope of the work is such that even at 608 pages it really only shaves the surface: two continents' worth of differing experiences across three hundred fifty years, and even leaving aside the French, Portuguese, etc, the book skips much and gives much more only a bare mention.

Even so, it's packed with solid information and written well; it flows in a way that keeps the vast amount of data from being laborious. Most of the English colonial experience I was already familiar with, but much of the Spanish experience was new to me, so I enjoyed a fairly large amount of learning.

It amused me that the author was very much aware of the "yo-yo" nature of this book, namely that it turned constantly between similarities and differences. 'In this fashion, these colonies were alike, but in this fashion different, but even there these elements were similar, but of course these differences are evident...' It's not a flaw, nor do I know how else one might have dealt with the subject (particularly given that the book is quite precisely a comparison) but it was a humorous bit of self-knowledge.

Mysteries of the Middle Ages: And the Beginning of the Modern World by Thomas Cahill - 4/10

Lots of interesting information in this book, which can best be described as "Unconnected Medieval People I Find Interesting, by Thomas Cahill". That said, there are enough places where he makes deliberate errors of conflation or omission that I dare not trust any of the material he presents; and he veers constantly into editorializing about current issues (e.g. the invasion of Iraq or the Catholic pedophelia coverup) so that the entire work basically becomes the quasi-historical grounding for Cahill's opinions. The fact that by and large I agree with him does not lead me to view the book with less distaste.