[geeks] History book suggestions?

[Mike Meredith]

Hi

Turning your email upside down, for my convenience ...

On Mon, 17 Apr 2006 16:28:30 -0400 (EDT), nate at portents.com wrote:
> "The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand?" by Gunder
> Frank "Europe: A History" by Norman Davies
> "A Brief History of Chinese and Japanese Civilizations" by Conrad
> Schirokauer, Miranda Brown, David Lurie, Suzanne Gay
> "The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia" by Rene
> Grousset "A History of Inner Asia" by Svat Soucek
> "A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the
> Creation of the Modern Middle East" by David Fromkin

If the rest of the books are as good as the Norman Davies, you're off to
a reasonable start there. I'd suggest you may need something to cover a
bit more of the history of the middle east ... I don't know how good it
is (it's still on my "must read soon" pile), but "The Middle East" by
Bernard Lewis covers roughly 2,000 years. You don't seem to have
anything that covers India which is more than worth looking at ... I
don't know how it compares to others, but "India: A History" by John
Keay was an excellent read. Including something on Africa would be a
good idea too.

> I was wondering if any of you had any suggestions on good history
> books.  Ideally, I could find one volume (or set of volumes) that
> would cover the last 5000 years of world history as a systemic whole
> (rather than break things down into the artificially discreet regions

I don't think you'll find anything like that other than very old and
very incomplete works ... it's too big a subject. Even something like
Davies on Europe only covers things superficially.

Not that I know anything about history ... I just read history books for
entertainment!