Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
ooh, you know i watched the movie and thought it was hilarious and not in a good way... the part where Tom Cruise gets shot up with bullets from a machine gun and in the next scene is up and walking.
Also doesn't it portray feudalism as a good thing? lol
ooh, you know i watched the movie and thought it was hilarious and not in a good way... the part where Tom Cruise gets shot up with bullets from a machine gun and in the next scene is up and walking.
Also doesn't it portray feudalism as a good thing? lol
I'm sure the book isn't like the movie,
No Tom Cruise in the book. Saigo was a very complex and interesting person. He is also a bit of a folk hero in Japan. The movie was very "Hollywood"...the real story is of course, far more interesting. The movie does give a "pro-feudalism" impression, but the real Saigo was instrumental in ending feudalism during the Meiji Restoration. His motivations and beliefs were far more complicated than what was portrayed in the film.
One of my favorite books is Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, by TJ Stiles. Stiles also won the Pultizer this year for Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America. He's a terrific writer.
there seem to be tons of history books, all about the same subject (e.g. Custer's last stand). What makes this any different?
I really liked In the Heart of the Sea by Nathanial Philbrick -- they made a movie of it fairly recently but I haven't seen it.
You might like biographies more than straight up history -- I've really liked some bios I've read of the Roosevelts, and of Charles Lindbergh.
Stephen Ambrose has some good stuff -- D-Day and Citizen Soldiers talk about the real soldiers who were involved. I really enjoyed those.
All the President's Men and The Final Days by Woodward and Bernstein are good.
I haven't yet read it (it's sitting in my TBR pile), but I've heard good things about One Summer by Bill Bryson. I've read some other things by Bryson and found him to be very accessible, not academic type writer.
No offense taken. But I disagree with the 'light' reading.
If you want light mainstream reading, try reading "The Revenant" (novel, not factual history). It was the literary equivalent of eating a saltine cracker for dinner.
I would recommend some historical fiction however - i.e. presenting fictional characters into historical events alongside historical characters. The best of them are carefully researched for historical accuracy (on the other hand the worst of them are just bad fiction or throw away Romance novels). I can't think of any regarding the old west but Jeff Shara for example for the Civil War, Mexican War, and American Revolution.
You might want to check out Glenn Frankel's The Searchers: the Making of an American Legend, which discusses the making of what many consider to be the finest American western, the actual incident (Cynthia and Quanah Parker) which gave rise to the film, and many other facets of the story.
Sputnik or the Soviet space program in general
Napoleon
The CIA
Efforts to 'mathematize' history, like Peter Turchin's but more mainstream if that makes more sense
Precolonial West Africa
My reading is almost always history, but lately have delved into sci-fi. I bought Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton, thinking it would be, but instead it's historical fiction about the opening of the American west and the first dinosaur explorers. It glosses over somethings, but brings to life the frontier west.
Napoleon: A Life by Roberts is an epic biography, but should have been in two volumes and is a bit much.
Eric Larson continues to produce books that are hard to put down. Don't know about elsewhere, but when I get to Richmond, the Barnes and Noble always seem to have his books on a table marked "buy one, get the other at half price. My only beef is that the print is very small, even with reading glasses, but they are so good, I deal with it.
The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I by Brunt is on par with Larson.
President Buchanan is a much maligned figure in US history. Personally, his handling of the Pig War and how war with Great Britain was avoided is usually overlooked; had we gone to war with Britain in 1859, the US could not have survived the coming years. On a different plane from the usually Civil War focus of Buchanan's legacy is Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King by Thomas J. Balcerski. It sheds light on the politics of the decades leading up to the Civil War, how Washington was run and all the while in the background of whether the two were gay (to use a modern term) or just a 19th century bromance.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
