Whatcha reading these days? I know Chris is into Agrippina: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire by Anthony A. Barrett, but then he's a scientist-turned-historian and he's interested in how things turned out the way they did - in societies past and present.
For that purpose, I always suggest Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, but that gives history from the perspective of a sentient great ape and even though it won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award and even though I bought 25 copies to use as a novel study by my last grade 12 English class, not everyone wants the great ape version of anthropology. Here's one with a sense of humour.
And we really do need to be able to laugh at ourselves even if it's only laughter from gallows humour. Tom Phillips has written Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up and it is as delightful a read as it is at times depressing. His dedication says it all:
Given the subject matter,dedicating this book to my family could be badly misinterpreted. So instead, I dedicate this to anybody who has ever fucked up really badly. You are not alone.
I was flipping through a preview on my Kindle version and finding … well, here's his timeline; you have a preview too.
Timeline of History
3 200 000 BCE: Lucy falls out of a tree and dies. Humanity will repeat this pattern many times over the following 3.2 million years.
70 000 BCE: Modern humans migrate out of Africa, ruining everything for everyone else.
70 000 BCE–40 000 BCE: Really bad period for Neanderthals.
12 000 BCE: Humanity invents war! YAY HUMANITY! GO TEAM!
11 000 BCE: Agriculture is invented, which may also have been an awful mistake
3000 BCE: The Sumerians and Egyptians invent the idea of “absolute dynastic monarchy.” Thanks for that, Egypt and Sumer!
2334 BCE: Sargon of Akkad goes one further and invents the idea of “empires.” Thanks for that, Sargon!
222 BCE: Qin Shi Huang unites China, searches for elixir of life, dies.
216 BCE: Battle of Cannae. Romans experiment with having two leaders, with opposing strategies. Goes roughly as well as you’d guess.
27 BCE: In excellent news for fans of dictatorship, the Roman Republic becomes the Roman Empire.
26 BCE–892 AD: Not much happens. Pretty quiet time, historically speaking.
1004: First contact between Europeans and Americans; ends in lots of murder.
1217: Ala ad-Din Muhammad II makes the worst decision in history: making an enemy of Genghis Khan.
1492: Christopher Columbus fails to discover new route to Asia, crashes into America instead. Honestly this is the point where everything starts going really wrong.
1519: In history’s most ill-advised hospitality, Montezuma invites Cortés in as a guest.
1617–1648: Ottoman Empire endures a run of mostly terrible leaders (two of them are called “the Mad,” which is a bad sign).
1698: Scotland tries to establish an empire in Panama. This doesn’t go well, leaving hundreds dead and the country almost bankrupt.
1788: Austrian army manages to defeat itself at the Battle of Karansebes.
1812: Napoleon tries to invade Russia. This turns out to be a terrible idea.
1859: Thomas Austin introduces 24 rabbits into Australia. This doesn’t end well.
1885: King Leopold II is given the Congo for charitable purposes. His purposes are...not charitable.
1890: Shakespeare fan Eugene Schieffelin introduces 60 starlings to New York, whimsically. They become a major, non-whimsical pest.
1914: World goes to war. It’s awful.
1917: In a well thought-through plan, Germany helps Lenin get back to Russia.
1923: The first leaded gasoline, developed by Thomas Midgley Jr., goes on sale. Several generations get lead poisoning.
1928: Not one to rest on his laurels, Thomas Midgley Jr. develops Freon. Which is bad news for the ozone layer.
1929: It is predicted that the economy is doing very well. Global financial crisis begins a few days later.
1933: The first dust storms of the American dust bowl begin.
1933: The very cunning German politician Franz von Papen does a deal wth Hitler in an attempt to regain power. Yeah, that doesn’t work out great.
1939: World goes to war again. Even more awful this time.
1941: Hitler tries to invade Russia. Luckily, this turns out to still be a terrible idea.
1945: Robert Oppenheimer predicts that nuclear weapons will end war. Results so far are mixed.
1958: Mao’s Four Pests campaign begins, leading to the killing of 1 billion sparrows.
1959: Chinese famine begins, caused in part by sudden lack of sparrows.
1960: Soviets divert rivers from Aral Sea. In shock news, the Aral Sea dries up.
1961: USA hilariously fails to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
1981: The Californian town of Sunol elects a dog called Bosco Ramos as mayor. This is the only good thing to happen on this timeline.
2007: It is predicted that the economy is doing very well. Global financial crisis begins a few days later.
2018: In April 2018, atmospheric carbon dioxide passes 410 parts per million for the first time in 3.2 million years. Hey, Lucy!
2019: This book is published. A new age of enlightenment dawns.
Phillips, Tom. Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up (p. 10). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Now, I have stood at the edge of Oldubai Gorge with Chris and Catriona on safari and looked down to where the Leakeys discovered the footprints of Lucy, our hominid ancestor. What did Tom Phillips know that suggested she died falling out of a tree? That's where the man earns the price of the book; he did his fact checking and he reported it fully and honestly.
He writes of studies of the fossilized bone fragments of Lucy by a team of scientists writing a paper for Nature, the world's leading scientific journal, and they concluded the "breaks" occurred while the subject was alive but that she died soon after and that the location of her accident at that time in history was flat and wooded and so in all probability she died from a fall out of a tree. And then he does what too few wannabe scientists today are willing to do; he concedes (with other researchers) that those findings by that first team of researchers could be wrong and he says why. At that point, I bought the book.
You have to buy it also if you want the full monte, and really, I'm finding it to be nakedly honest, very informed and immensely entertaining. You could go to my "free stuff" page and learn about grammar and poetry, but I wouldn't blame you at all if you opted to forego a possibly painful trip down that memory lane for a riotous romp through three million years of hominid history. I'm left wondering how many years (centuries?) will need to pass before the monstrous evil of the Gaza genocide and the global (but also too close to us) shredding of democratic ideals become the stuff of historical jokes for stand-up comics and history teachers.
And then there's my favourite intellectual - Stephen Pinker - whose latest is about our shared knowledge and what we do with it. Here's an edited version of one reviewer's assessment.
Stephen Pinker tells us how we think about each other’s thoughts about each other’s thoughts. This common knowledge is necessary for coordination, for making choices like driving on the right (mostly), using paper currency, and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It’s also necessary for social coordination: everything from rendezvousing at a time and place to speaking the same language to forming enduring relationships of friendship, romance, or authority. Humans have a sixth sense for common knowledge, and we create it with laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech.
But people also go to great lengths to avoid common knowledge—to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can’t know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and pretending not to see the elephant in the room.
Pinker shows the hidden logic of common knowledge answering questions like:
Why do people hoard toilet paper at the first sign of an emergency?
Why are Super Bowl ads filled with ads for crypto?
Why do citizens typically select the candidate they believe is preferred by others rather than their favorite?
Why did Russian authorities arrest a protester who carried a blank sign?
Why is it hard for nervous lovers to say goodbye at the end of phone calls?
Why does everyone agree that if we were completely honest all the time, life would be unbearable?
In explaining the paradoxes of human behavior, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… invites us to understand the ways we try to get into each other’s heads and the harmonies, hypocrisies, and outrages that result.
What are you reading these days? Seriously. I don't always get a lot of feedback from you site users & readers and I value the comments some of you do take the time to send my way. Daughter 'o mine added an analytics function to my blog page and that information on user visits has kept me from a total loss of self confidence.
I'm always interested in the interests of friends and even "friends" and that's not just fishing for compliments. If you, however, want to go fishing in fact and need some fishing equipment, go visit my Facebook marketplace postings. Gotta downsize. That's why any books you recommend should be kindle or library accessible.
Now, you decided to click on that link I sent and you got these book reviews and a sales pitch. Oh well, you could have been lured into pleas for sympathetic endorsement of Poilievre's policies, carefully thought-out plans, rants. Go put your garden to bed and when you yourself get into bed, read a good book.