Reviewing Janet Arrowood's "Plain Language, Please"

When I put books on hold at the library, I rarely know how “big” the book is (either by external dimensions or the amount of pages). Yes, yes, I know you can actually see the page amount in most library catalog sites. It’s usually there with the printing year and publishing house. But I don’t pay attention to that. It makes things interesting.

Sometimes I am overwhelmed. More than once I have put a book on hold on a whim, only to find myself lugging what felt like a set of Encyclopedia Britannicas home on my next trip to the library.

Lives in Ruins...and no, I'm not talking about that one movie

Coming off my reading of The Death of Caesar, it seemed only fitting to transition to something more…lively. And quite coincidentally this audio book, which had been on hold for several weeks, came into the library just as I finished reading Caesar. 

Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble. The title itself was most promising.  In this book, author Marilyn Johnson doesn’t so much look at how archaeologists work, but rather why they do that work in the first place. The answer, she thinks, is a sort of infatuation that takes hold of you when you look at a remnant of the past and see the past through it.

Reviewing Barry Strauss' "The Death of Caesar"

Every book you will ever read will be a message from the past. 

Think about it. Even if a book is written at break-neck speed, there’s an entire process of editing, beta-reading, publishing contracts, manufacture and distribution that takes a bit of time. Then there’s the additional and varying lag-time of how long it takes you to learn of a particular book’s existence.  Sometimes, especially with a series of novels, it’s easier to keep track of this last factor. One can pre-order, pre-purchase, pre-hold so as to get the book hot off the press. 

But if you’re like me, you have a To Be Read Pile that is dangerously close to knocking the International Space Station out of orbit. So even if you do receive a book ASAP, it may be buried under a pile of other books. (I can almost imagine the books I own saying to my library holds, “Back of the line, take a number.”)

Back to the main point: because a book is a message from the past, it behooves* a reader to not only be a lot geeky about literature, but also a little geeky about history too. The further back a book’s publication goes into the annals of time, the more a reader might have to dig to understand what the book’s contemporary readers would have taken for granted. Try reading Jane Austen without learning about the social rules of 1800’s Britain and you’ll soon understand what I mean.

I think my “To Be Read [History]” pile is possibly just as tall as my pile of other miscellaneous books. Like good literature, nonfiction history books serve a greater purpose than just entertainment: it helps the reader better comprehend the world around them. If an architect wanted to understand the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the first thing they would need would be to research the building’s foundation. Thus, in order to understand politics, sociology, international relations, conquests, wars, racial problems, religious movements, and other things that are so prevalent in the news these days, we should look to the foundation of our current world by reading history.

Source: https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-HJ525_bkrvce_12S_20150312123601.jpg

One such book that I think does this well is The Death of Caesar: The Story of History's Most Famous Assassination. I imagine writing history lends itself to two temptations:

-          To elaborate and speculate and make almost a novel out of events

-          To stick only to what can be proven through archaeological evidence and cross-referencing primary sources, basically turning it into a textbook