Am I the only one remembering Stewart Lee's sketch about UKIP?
How did people get to Britain 950k years ago?
11–20 of 95 posts
Re: How did people get to Britain 950k years ago?
#12What a weird introduction.
Re: How did people get to Britain 950k years ago?
#13As far as I understand, Ian Morris's books are not taken very seriously in the academic world. I've read the first part of /Why the West rules/ and must admit that it reads a bit like trying to push a narrative: spinning up facts the right way to make them support his ideas and asserting universal truths without much backing… but I think I'm biased by the reviews I checked before reading the (first part of the) book.
The writing quality in this article would suggest he is indeed a pretty poor hack. I'd be embarrassed to call myself a professional author if this is how i wrote
> Like all scientific laws, Thatcher’s has exceptions. Britain has not really “always been” in Europe, because there has not always been a Europe to be in. Our planet has existed for 4.6 billion years, but shifting continental plates only began creating what we now call Europe about 200 million years ago.
- a "scientifc law" (nope!) you invented in the previous paragraph predicated on a blatantly incorrect interpretation of a statement someone made about something unrelated to whatever you are talking about
> Britain has not really “always been” in Europe, because there has not always been a Europe to be in. Our planet has existed for 4.6 billion years, but shifting continental plates only began creating what we now call Europe about 200 million years ago.
- North America was also in Pangea. So what? I can't tell if this is failed wit or failed attempts at engineering some kind of moral highground based on geography?
All that before you mention the pompous political shoehorning.
I should have kept the writing up if this meets a publisher's standards
Re: How did people get to Britain 950k years ago?
#14As far as I understand, Ian Morris's books are not taken very seriously in the academic world. I've read the first part of /Why the West rules/ and must admit that it reads a bit like trying to push a narrative: spinning up facts the right way to make them support his ideas and asserting universal truths without much backing… but I think I'm biased by the reviews I checked before reading the (first part of the) book.
Genuine question: I've heard this criticism for literally every pop-history book I've read (Guns, Germs, and Steel; Sapiens; The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, etc). Are there any history books that are taken seriously in the academic world that are actually fun to read? If so, any recommendations? If not, is the issue basically that if you want some history book to be fun, you've got…
Not a book, but acoup.blog has lots of well sourced, fun to read, articles by a history professor. The academic response to them has been positive from what I’ve seen.
Re: How did people get to Britain 950k years ago?
#15Trick question. They didn't. Britain didn't exist until 1707.
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Re: How did people get to Britain 950k years ago?
#16On foot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
Most people are not aware that the sea level rose with more than 120 meters in the past 20k years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.pn...
Re: How did people get to Britain 950k years ago?
#17As far as I understand, Ian Morris's books are not taken very seriously in the academic world. I've read the first part of /Why the West rules/ and must admit that it reads a bit like trying to push a narrative: spinning up facts the right way to make them support his ideas and asserting universal truths without much backing… but I think I'm biased by the reviews I checked before reading the (first part of the) book.
Genuine question: I've heard this criticism for literally every pop-history book I've read (Guns, Germs, and Steel; Sapiens; The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, etc). Are there any history books that are taken seriously in the academic world that are actually fun to read? If so, any recommendations? If not, is the issue basically that if you want some history book to be fun, you've got…
I am really enjoying Crucible of War by Fred Anderson, it's about the 7 year war (1756-1763?) and essentially how it lay the pretext for the American War of Independence but is often overlooked by modern teaching. For me it strikes the right balance for something that has citations for almost everything, but at the same time is fluid to read and you can get into a groove with his battle and scene descriptions. He also manages to deal with bias rather well, which is a tricky thing to do and is what many books that you cite have struggled with (that and rigor of writing), especially when dealing with the assymetry of information available about the time (much more writings from the British/french side than the Indian). He includes this fact in his writing so that you don't get the impression that this is the whole picture. One more thing I see as another potential folly for many pophistory books is breadth. Many tend to take much to big a bite of history and attempt to get it all in ~800 pages, that's not going to happen unless you do some major glossing over at some parts. A book that's considered "good history" I've noticed will be shorter in focus length (not to be confused with book length), if the author wants to write about a whole century or two, they'll split it up into several books. Overall I think it's a great book for someone that wants to get into more rigorous historical text. And I think it's important to remember that not everything has to be fun, in the end what we're doing is reading past events, some events are going to be interesting to you, others not so much. Find your interests and read history books about that, it'll do some of the "fun to read" legwork.
Re: How did people get to Britain 950k years ago?
#18No post body was provided.
Re: How did people get to Britain 950k years ago?
#19Africa-centric theory of human origin has been debunked. Marxists should stop spreading this racist propaganda.
Re: How did people get to Britain 950k years ago?
#20As far as I understand, Ian Morris's books are not taken very seriously in the academic world. I've read the first part of /Why the West rules/ and must admit that it reads a bit like trying to push a narrative: spinning up facts the right way to make them support his ideas and asserting universal truths without much backing… but I think I'm biased by the reviews I checked before reading the (first part of the) book.
Genuine question: I've heard this criticism for literally every pop-history book I've read (Guns, Germs, and Steel; Sapiens; The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, etc). Are there any history books that are taken seriously in the academic world that are actually fun to read? If so, any recommendations? If not, is the issue basically that if you want some history book to be fun, you've got…
Books by Adrian Goldsworthy are well received in academic journals, as far as I've seen. Especially his long book on Caesar. Not sure whether they'd be labeled universally as fun to read, though. But if you want history books focused on Rome, they're pretty accessible and apparently taken seriously enough.