2025 read #8: Normal Women by Philippa Gregory.

Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History by Philippa Gregory

580 pages

Published 2023

Read from January 4 to January 22

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Everything in any given society is the result of a choice. The choice may have been deliberate, something coded into law to achieve a stated purpose on a documented date, or it may have been a gradual drift from a former attitude, but it was a choice either way. It’s endlessly frustrating that a significant political faction is either ignorant of this basic fact, or choosing to obfuscate it to ground their appeals to “traditional values” in some myth of “it’s always been this way, it’s natural.” In human culture, nothing is natural; nothing is a default. To pretend otherwise is to attempt to enforce your own preferred choices on others.

This book is a vast documentation of the choices that have been made in England regarding the roles, liberties, limitations, and expectations placed upon women since 1066. Gregory’s dexterous prose turns a potentially dry recitation of people and places into a compulsively readable narrative, equal parts inspiring and enraging. From the imposition of oppressive Norman laws, to the wholesale invention biblical misogyny in William Tynsdale’s translation, to the creation of binary sexes by elite men of the Enlightenment, to the cultural vilification of single mothers in the 1970s, Gregory traces the step-by-step creation of today’s gender hierarchy, drawn up in imaginary lists of differences between women and men, and enforced through courts, the pulpit, and the university.

Hand in hand with the laws and social movements meant to demonize and marginalize women went acts by the elite to create an enclosed, landowning, cash-driven society. The loss of connection to the land, and the prosecution of those who formerly could make a living off the common, created the conditions for colonialism, extractive capitalism, and the carceral state. I’ve often said the English aristocrats first colonized their own working classes; Normal Women documents the sociopolitical connections between classism, misogyny, and the invention of modern inequality:

The tradition that women work for their families without payment, and that men dedicate themselves to wage earning, became established by the enclosures of common land in the seventeenth century — long before the rhetoric of a ‘breadwinner wage’ was invented.

In an era when the worst impulses of the elites — grasping for absolute power, artificially inflating prices for necessities while stripping the working population of livable wages — are racing toward fruition, the history of these cultural choices is a bracing, infuriating, necessary read.

2024 read #157: Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard.

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World by Mary Beard

479 pages

Published 2023

Read from December 21 to December 25

Rating: 4 out of 5

The follow-up to Beard’s SPQR, Emperor is an examination of the office of Roman emperor, and the popular perceptions of the autocratic edifice, more than it is a biography of any particular caesar, or (worse still) a recitation of names and dates. This is Beard’s familiar approach, and a solid example why she’s one of the few popular historians I would trust to write a book on Rome. This is no “Big Man” history. As Beard writes in her prologue:

Working on the Roman empire for so long, I have come increasingly to detest autocracy as a political system, but to be more sympathetic, not just to its victims, but to all those caught up in it from bottom to top….

Accordingly, she works to populate the palace with glimpses of the women, slaves, laborers, functionaries, poets, doctors, diviners, entertainers, children, and the other essential-but-ignored foundations of the Roman state. The office of emperor is a lens, bending the apparatus of ancient society into our line of sight. Ancient propaganda regarding “good” and “bad” emperors is treated not as historical fact, but as a means of assessing attitudes and fears held by the elite (or, when we can access them, the ordinary people) toward the autocrats above them.

Beard’s thesis could be summed up with a line in chapter five: “Can we ever see a human being through the spin, the propaganda, the praise and denunciations?” It’s a salutary perspective, especially in our contemporary culture, where the loudest voices are paid shills for authority, and mediocre white men think about “the Roman Empire” multiple times a day.

Like the rest of us, Beard sounds more exhausted than she did in 2015. Emperor lacks some of the sparkle and dry wit of SPQR, but remains a thoroughly engrossing history, with something important to say about our own era of looming autocracy.

2024 read #67: The English Actor by Peter Ackroyd.

The English Actor: From Medieval to Modern by Peter Ackroyd

385 pages

Published 2023

Read from June 6 to June 12

Rating: 3 out of 5

Around the time that I read Ackroyd’s biography of Shakespeare, I learned that this book was in the pipeline, soon to be published. I was tempted to preorder it and turn it into a loose Ackroyd-on-acting double bill. Instead, I got it used as a housewarming gift to myself a couple months ago, and haven’t gotten around to it until now.

It’s a typical Ackroydian history, rambling through its subject with an eye for illustrative anecdote but rarely, if ever, scratching beneath the surface. One is reminded of his Albion, in which he posits that the English “taste” is for surface ornamentation at the expense of internal complexity, which seems to describe his popular histories quite well.

Admittedly, the breadth of The English Actor’s subject doesn’t leave room for much depth. Not even halfway through, it abandons any pretense at historical overview to become a string of pocket biographies. Early actors so famous that even I have heard of them — Edward Alleyne, Nell Gwyn, Edmund Kean — scarcely get a page or two to themselves, leaving more than half the book to detail the twentieth century. I’m more drawn to the “medieval” part of the subtitle than to the “modern”; I’d rather get a chapter or two expanding on Ackroyd’s brief mentions of Anglo-Saxon bards and medieval liturgical plays, instead of chapter after chapter listing out the major roles of near-contemporary actors. I’m sure there’s some sort of stage equivalent of IMDb I could turn to if I ever needed more of that.

My personal tastes in subject matter aside, I don’t think this was Ackroyd’s best effort. It’s missing the brio he brings to his better work. In places, the text feels rushed; he repeats anecdotes and quotations as if no one got around to editing out the placeholders.

2023 read #41: Weavers, Scribes, and Kings by Amanda H. Podany.

Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East by Amanda H. Podany

557 pages

Published 2022

Read from April 13 to April 25

Rating: 4 out of 5

A vast survey of Mesopotamian history, constrained only to the times and places that gave us records inscribed in cuneiform, this book promised it would pay particular attention to the traces of common people normally ignored in such historical surveys: slaves, brewers, artisans, merchants, priestesses, the titular weavers. That’s an irresistible selling line. I went back and forth about whether to invest all that money on buying a tome, but in the end I have no regrets.

I might take issue with this book’s execution — Podany spends much (maybe even most) of the book in the company of kings instead of weavers. But all the kings-and-wars bullshit is sadly necessary to relate the rest of this volume to the standard histories we might be taught, a grounding context of empires and conquest that Americans certainly expect from their history books. (Also unfortunate but expected: tying the later chapters in with Biblical “history.”) We could have done with a lot fewer kings here, but it could have been a lot worse.

The fact that Podany spends as much time as she does with common folk and merchants and scribes elevates Weavers far above the likes of, say, Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Ancient World, which was all Great Men all the time (and was all the worse for it). Any history book that at least attempts to get away from Great Men narratives deserves accolades.

2023 read #20: Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd.

Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

521 pages

Published 2004

Read from February 10 to February 24

Rating: 4 out of 5

I’ve rarely read historical biographies. Many years ago I attempted Peter Ackroyd’s hefty The Life of Thomas More, but it proved so dense and abstruse that I gave up less than halfway through.

Ackroyd’s characteristic style (which assumes the reader already has a full understanding of the subject, eschewing any overview before stringing together obscure anecdotes, achieving a vibe instead of laying out the foundations and building from them) suited me better here. Somehow I’ve gotten through 40 years having read exactly one piece of Shakespeare’s writing—Hamlet. But Will Shakespeare pervades anglophone pop culture and general awareness far more than Thomas More. With that preexisting scaffolding in place, I learned a lot about the shape and texture of Shakespeare’s life and work from this book. Even better, Ackroyd takes pains to place the writer in the context of his time and culture. I was particularly drawn to the fleeting images of his fellow actors and the ways Shakespeare likely created his characters to suit their abilities.

Ackroyd’s tendency to just vibe makes for some strange sources. Twice he references what phrenologists concluded about Shakespeare’s cranium, apparently in all seriousness. Not the route I’d go with a 21st century biography.

2019 read #21: Resurrection of the Wild by Deborah Fleming.

Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio's Natural Landscape by Deborah Fleming
182 pages
Published 2019
Read from November 19 to November 24
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

With a title like that, I expected this book to focus on a subject dear to my heart: the restoration and rewilding of landscapes and waterscapes. It turned out to be a series of essays, some published as long ago as 2000, all of them only vaguely connected by the book's subtitle. The overall theme is not rewilding so much as attempts to create a sustainable relationship between human beings and the natural world we dwell in. There are pocket biographies of John Chapman ("Johnny Appleseed") and sustainable farming innovator Louis Bromfield; there's an examination of how problematic and coercive Amish communities can be, followed without apparent irony by a wistful account of a young family building a counterculture homestead in the 1970s. Like a Midwestern answer to Roger Deakin's descriptions of Walnut Tree Farm, Fleming devotes a chapter to humble-bragging about the history and bucolic charms of her own farm, Wedding Pines.

Much of the rest of the book examines just how thoroughly factory farms, subdivision developments, strip mining, and horizontal fracking have destroyed the land, the soil, the water, the air, the landscape, human health, the natural world, and the future. "I did not think the human race worth saving," she remarks during a tangent about the missionaries who barge onto her farm. Far from resurrection, the impression Fleming leaves is one of defeat and erosion—the loss of our liberties to the wealthy few who keep county commissioners and state agencies in their pockets, a feeling of futility as urban sprawl devours more and more of the land. I've grown to appreciate and love the natural world of Ohio during these ten months of living here, which makes this book all the more depressing.

2019 read #2: Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin.

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin
Edited by Alison Hastie and Terrence Blacker
302 pages
Published 2008
Read from December 28, 2018 to January 15
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Roger Deakin is one of my all-time favorite authors, though in his lifetime he only published one book (Waterlog) and finished the manuscript for one other (Wildwood). Not long after I read Waterlog, I ordered a copy of Walnut Tree Farm, a collection of Deakin's journal entries from his later years, collated and compiled into a single "year" of entries—natural history observations, musings on pollarding and sustainable uses of common land, mixed together with rather more personal entries on Deakin's boyhood, his loneliness and horniness living alone at the namesake farm, his crabby misanthropy toward suburbanites and women out jogging who don't respond to his hellos.

I held off from reading Notes for all these years, possibly because I didn't want to read the last published words to come from his pen. Having finally read his journals, I'm left with a feeling of knowing a little bit too much about him—that maybe I didn't need my image of Deakin the sensitive and perceptive eccentric who soaked up woods and waters in all the forgotten little nooks of England to be replaced with a more grounded, less ethereal image of a cranky old goat alternating between lustful fantasies and "things will never be as good as they were when I was a boy" conservatism.

Notes is a strange document, a posthumous publication of diaries never intended to be made public. It's full of lovely observations of the natural world around Deakin's farm and the adjoining common, arranged in a seasonal cycle, ending in a lovely and sad moment of shooting stars, which could easily have been purpose-written to serve as a coda for Deakin's life. But in revealing so much of the man behind the words, Notes can only make him appear more human, more fragile and fallible.

Deakin's diaries often dwell on the topic of how people no longer appreciate the natural world and what it has to offer, contrasting the modern suburbanized state with his own idyllic recollections of childhood adventures along creeks and in copses. One might question just how attuned most English folks were to natural cycles of subsistence during Deakin's golden age, but we'll leave that aside. I find myself interested in the conservative roots of conservation. You can catch a whiff of nativism in a lot of these lovely works of English nature writing, this idea that "the old ways are the best" for conserving the health and vitality of the English natural world. "People these days" (meaning urbanized people, technocratic people, often the agents from a central government body, sometimes immigrant populations) just aren't in touch with the real life of the hedgerows and little waterways, just don't understand how to manage land in harmony with the plants and creatures that share it.

I'm reminded of how much our American, Muir-inspired "wilderness" ethos derives from the proto-fascist Rousseau, and erases millennia of Native history and land-use practices with the words "where Man himself is a visitor and does not remain."

It's a troubling ideological heritage for us to unpack. Our species and our culture need to do what we can to ameliorate the massive extinction event we're inflicting upon the world, but we have to do so together—not by excluding "people these days," however they might be coded.

2018 read #22: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson.

The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson
509 pages
Published 2010
Read from October 2 to October 19
Rating: 3 out of 5

An incident early in this book illustrates the dangers of focusing your history tome on the deeds and concerns of kings rather than on the people whose labor actually does the hard business of creating history. Mere pages after briefly acknowledging the sheer misery and life-crushing demands of being a serf in ancient Egypt—squeezed between laboring for the monuments of the elite and having to pay the king rent for the very land they farm—Wilkinson adopts a rhetorical posture rooting for the god-kings during a period of weakened authority and social turmoil: "What the state needed was another strong leader in the mold of Narmer, someone with the charisma, strength, and determination to rebuild the edifice of power before all was lost.... Ancient Egyptian civilization may never have progressed beyond its formative stage, may never have developed its distinctive pyramids, temples, and tombs, had it not been for [Khasekhem,] the last ruler of the Second Dynasty...." Khasekhem committed his land and his people to three millennia of forced labor and brutal autocracy, but hey, at least he saved the pyramids, guys!

To his credit, Wilkinson peppers his kingly narrative with scenes from the lives of the commonfolk, on those rare occasions when those scenes are preserved—usually whenever someone works their way up from the lower ranks into the inner circle of the pharaohs, maybe once a Dynasty or so. But these interludes barely intrude upon the lists of kings and temples, priests and generals, the privileged figureheads whose deeds and misdeeds comprise the bulk of Wilkinson's narrative. It is hard to give voice to the voiceless masses of history; only specialists in social history even seem inclined to try.

For what it sets out to do, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt is interesting, readable, and informative. The popular concept of ancient Egypt, I discovered, mixes and matches themes and decorations from nearly three thousand years of history—the sacred cat and crocodile mummies alongside Tutankhamen, buried together in the pyramid of Khufu. It's reminiscent of the joke from Futurama when a historical reenactor portraying Ghandi says, "Let's disco dance, Hammurabi!" The bigger picture of slow growth and morphing of religious and physical culture over those millennia, responding to influxes from or expansion into Nubia, the Levant, and Libya, was a fascinating topic that Wilkinson explored at length (though usually framed by the god-state cult of pharaohnic rule).

As with so many other ambitious history tomes, this is a worthy read, though one that lacked much in the way of social history outside the halls of power.

2017 read #5: The Honourable Company by John Keay.

The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company by John Keay
460 pages
Published 1991
Read from October 16 to October 26
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

A competent and thorough history, albeit one plagued by a tendency (shared by many such wide-ranging overviews) to assume that particular persons and events are general knowledge. It also tells the story of the East India Company almost entirely from the British point of view -- understandable, perhaps, given its date of publication (and the paucity of written primary sources from Subcontinental sources), but frustrating to a modern reader.

2016 read #92: A Wicked Company by Philipp Blom.

A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment by Philipp Blom
340 pages
Published 2010
Read from November 15 to December 14
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

What we commonly understand to be the Enlightenment, declares Blom in a moving epilogue, is a bourgeois dilution of the radical ideas of the real thinkers of the Enlightenment -- a dilution that elevated the "moderate" sensibilities of Voltaire and Kant to better fit the ideals of a "rationalistic," industrial society, while discarding the inconvenient positions of Diderot, Holbach, Raynal, Helvétius, and others who frequented the philosophical discussions in Holbach's salon, who formed the core of the true Enlightenment. The philosophes at Holbach's dinner table advocated instinct, the drive for pleasure and the avoidance of pain, moderated and directed by reason and empathy -- a society without gods or priests or aristocrats, without imbalances in wealth or power, without exploitation of the poor or colonization of less-well-armed societies around the globe. This radical Enlightenment, says Blom, was snuffed out by the Revolution in the hands of Robespierre, who seized upon the rival philosophy of Rousseau, a philosophy that permitted autocratic tyranny and religious power in pursuit of some abstracted ideal of "natural man."

Blom sketches a fascinating but often repetitive tale of these thinkers and philosophers as they cross paths with each other and with the wider scenes of history. His personal bias can be blatant at times, between his sustained character assassination of Rousseau and his obvious hero-worship of Baron Paul Thiry Holbach. A chapter detailing the frustrated sexual fetishes of Rousseau is entertaining, but makes for an overly reductive psychosexual case for Rousseau's philosophical convictions. While Rousseau deserves to be taken down quite a few pegs, I'm not sure that exploring his desire to be whipped and punished is entirely relevant to that task.

Rousseau, inadvertent father of the Romantics, holds a place in the philosophical foundations of conservationism and outdoor recreation, by crooked inspirational paths reaching through Muir and beyond, so it was startling to learn, for the first time, how ghastly his "social contract" really was, how reprehensible his personal and family life (siring four children with his mistress, and making her leave them as foundlings, all while writing his highflown ruminations on "proper" childrearing) were. That kind of character assassination -- using his actual positions and his handling of those in his power to portray his ugly character -- is a completely legitimate angle for Blom to take, and he handles it ably.

The overall impression left by A Wicked Company in this Age of Trumpism is a depressing realization of how many of the issues we face today -- ignorance, exploitation of the poor, dehumanization of women, religious and monetary power, colonialism, repression of empathy and compassion, suppression and distortion of healthy sexuality -- were recognized and debated over two centuries ago in a salon in Paris, and how little progress has been made toward realizing the free and happy state of brotherhood and equality dreamed by the philosophes. The Enlightenment ends in the suburbs, Diderot proclaims, and that is especially true in 2016.

2016 read #59: Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane.

Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
342 pages
Published 2015
Read from July 22 to July 28
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Much of the critical coverage I've seen relating to this book emphasized its role as a "word-hoard." At least one review gently chided Macfarlane for producing what at times amounts to a topographic dictionary; I put off reading Landmarks for months, in fact, persuaded that it sounded more apt as a reference volume than an edifying read. The word-hoards, however, make up only half of the raison d'être of this volume. Landmarks is equally if not more so a wayfinding exercise through Macfarlane's influences as a writer, a protracted argument by example in support of a particular school of nature writing. Many of the chapters began life as introductions to the foundational texts (and authors) Macfarlane visits. The visits range from moving epitaphs (the chapter on Roger Deakin) to cursory overviews that quickly veer away to different authors altogether (the "North-Minded" chapter begins as an ostensible examination of Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams but spends far more words introducing Peter Davidson). Macfarlane produces some of his most precise and elegant prose in pursuit of these authors, but its beauty is often pulled up short by his subject matter -- a guided tour of a writer's favorite books, no matter how elegantly worded, is always going to carry the stigma of a listicle.

The word-hoard, in its turn, is fascinating, but so loaded with Gaelic words and regional synonyms for general terms that its usefulness to an outside writer is limited, except in its role as a prompt to imagination and specificity. Which, after all, is Macfarlane's central argument throughout Landmarks. Great nature writing demands precision of meaning; the culture-wide drain of that precise awareness of the natural world is what Macfarlane, in his own way, hopes to avert, or at least delay.

2016 read #53: Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
259 pages
Published 2005
Read from June 22 to June 23
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Another thoroughly engaging history book / travel memoir / snarky NPR segment from Vowell, this one tracing the physical sites associated with (and the coincidental connections between) assassinations of three nineteenth century presidents: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Along the way we learn about the Oneida Community and the slow diminution of the Republican party, from the grand old party of Lincoln to the Southern Strategists of the Bush/Rove/Ashcroft era. As with all Vowell books, the central draw is more the entertainment value than the depth of didacticism; nevertheless, I feel like I learned quite a bit. My tastes in history tend toward the ancient and the primeval -- when it comes to American history, I check out around the close of the Seven Years' War -- so I was unexpectedly engrossed by Vowell's breezy overview of the naked corruption and boss politics of the Gilded Age, an era I really should learn more about.

2016 read #35: The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf.

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf
342 pages
Published 2015
Read from April 26 to April 29
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I kept seeing this book on "best book of the year" lists, so I went into it with unrealistic expectations. Wulf explores a fascinating period of intellectual development, the cusp between the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, and Humboldt himself is a significant character well deserving of scrutiny and publicity. Wulf traces Humboldt's influence on the thinking and work of historical figures ranging from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Simón Bolívar to John Muir, and on movements ranging from conservation and environmentalism to Art Nouveau and nature writing. It is a perfectly serviceable scientific biography, providing far more scientific and contemporary context than Chrysalis, for example, but I've been spoiled lately by history books written with considerably more verve and personality. Invention is written in what I would call the default historical biography voice: informative, bland, interchangeable. It lacks the snarkiness of Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, the authoritative skepticism of SPQR, the imaginative flourishes of The Witches. Wulf's prose flows well but tends to be as bland as noodles.

2016 read #29: SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard.

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
538 pages
Published 2015
Read from April 6 to April 12
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Now this is how to do a history tome. Beard has been recommended to me in the past, and I must say I am thoroughly impressed by her mix of hard-nosed skepticism, dry humor, and colorful character detail, as well as her resistance to the Big Person trap that certain other historians (cough, Susan Wise Bauer, cough) slide into. It's refreshing to see a historian simultaneously seeking out the almost-lost voices of common folk, delighting in barroom jokes painted in Pompeii and the modest gravestone brags of successful laundrymen, while minimizing the personal impact of any given emperor's foibles.

I particularly admired Beard's approach to handling the "truth" behind the myths (such as Romulus and Remus, or the ancient Roman kings, or various heroes of the early Republic). In perfect contrast to Bauer, who insisted on some nugget of fact inspiring even the most outlandish ancient myth, Beard is interested, sensibly, in what the telling of these myths might suggest about the concerns, worldview, and hidden anxieties of contemporary people. Throughout, Beard retains her healthy skepticism while demonstrating a thorough expertise in her subject matter -- all with a dexterous and appealing command of prose, a rare combination of historical expert and polished author. This may be her magnum opus, but I'm eager to look into her other books.

2016 read #5: Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell.

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell
270 pages
Published 2015
Read from January 9 to January 10
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Scholarship for the internet age, Lafayette is written in full-on snark mode, breezily quipping through the life and legacy of the Marquis de Lafayette, Revolutionary War hero, as if a smart-alecky news blog column escaped its confines and skipped along for almost three hundred pages. Which makes for a tremendously entertaining but not especially informative or analytical book. But the Revolutionary War, by some accident of omission (and later apathy on my part), has been one of the gaps in my understanding of history, and I had long desired a relatively unbiased treatment of the period, so even the superficial sketch given here was a welcome addition to my knowledge base. The character of Lafayette himself was especially intriguing, given that beforehand I had known scarcely more than his name and his nationality.

2015 read #51: The Faithful Executioner by Joel F. Harrington.

The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century by Joel F. Harrington
256 pages
Published 2013
Read from September 15 to September 17
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

The understandable (but nonetheless frustrating) tendency among historians and other social scientists is to tease out any number of speculations and possible interpretations from thin skeins of evidence. Naturally, we want to build up as full a picture as possible from the primary sources at hand, but this almost guarantees that the resulting narrative will say more about our own (or at least the author's) values and cultural assumptions than it does about the worldview of the historical subject. Harrington stresses the "empathy" and "disgust" alternately discernible in the laconic, otherwise impersonal journal of Meister Frantz Schmidt, executioner for the city of Nuremburg in the sixteenth century, emotional responses Harrington uses to shore up his depiction of Schmidt as a man obsessed with honor (personal and familial) and social status. But Harrington surmises Schmidt's visceral reactions based on the number of words and amount of detail Schmidt devotes in his journal to each of the punishments he notates, e.g. Schmidt was appalled by breaches of the social contract in cases wherein servants rob their masters or destitute women kill their newborns. This is perhaps not wholly inaccurate, but as far as interpretive methodologies go, it seems especially flimsy, and Harrington's "honor and shame" storyline is rather simplistic. Hitching the interpretive narrative to one conceptual through-line is common enough, in academic works ranging from doctoral dissertations to popular paperback histories, but it is less than satisfying.

The Faithful Executioner makes up for its lack of nuance (which, admittedly, is largely concomitant with the lack of primary sources) by examining several fascinating and extremely underrepresented topics: the life and aspirations of common people, the activities and words of the underclass, and (let's be honest) the salacious details of long ago crime. Harrington's prose is dry but readable. I would have appreciated something like an appendix translating Schmidt's writings without Harrington's selective quotation, which perhaps could have bolstered what I felt were Harrington's more tenuous claims of Schmidt's perceptions and reactions (or perhaps not).

2015 read #46: H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald.

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
285 pages
Published 2014
Read from September 2 to September 4
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

There's something about the commingling of exquisitely perceptive nature writing with a raw, emotional, viscerally depicted memoir of personal grief and loss that sinks right into the quiet silt and calcified fossils in my heart. The most obvious parallel for this book is, of course, Wild by Cheryl Strayed: like Strayed, Macdonald is crushed under her grief for the loss of a parent and eventually immerses herself in a particular sense of wildness in order to reorder her life and fill the void. But Macdonald's prose is sensitive and keen in ways Strayed's good but not brilliant wording could never be, recalling Macdonald's peers in modern English nature prose-poetry, such as Robert Macfarlane and the late Roger Deakin. Macfarlane's grief at the passing of Deakin, in fact, makes his The Wild Places something of an exact analog. Macdonald, however, avoids the philosophical abstractions of Macfarlane and the contented noodling of Deakin to craft her own direct, incisive language of hurt and literal bewilderment. I have to go all the way back to the brilliance of Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost to find a proper comparison: another near-perfect examination of loss and landscape.

Macdonald additionally interweaves a fascinating portrayal of T. H. White, most pertinently the author of The Goshawk, whose psychological profile provides both parallels and contrasts for Macdonald's own emotional burdens. Her psychosexual analysis of White is possibly too pat -- White's bumbling mistreatment of his beloved Gos probably doesn't tie in quite so directly with White's childhood abuse and suppressed desires -- but Macdonald makes of it fascinating reading.

2015 read #18: The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane.

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane
374 pages
Published 2012
Read from March 30 to April 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

There was an unconformity (in the geological sense) between this book and me, or between what the author intended to write and what I hoped and expected to read. I was beguiled by Macfarlane's The Wild Places, so easily and thoroughly charmed by his style and perspective that I prematurely forecast that Macfarlane would "quickly become one of my favorite authors." The mismatch may well be on my end -- circumstances have forced me to read this book in snatches of stolen time, rarely more than fifteen or twenty pages in a go, and with prose this consciously elliptical (there's even a glossary elucidating the more niche terminology Macfarlane employs), and a thematic through-line this all-encompassing and attenuated, it's likely my attention was too scattershot and flighty to appreciate what Macfarlane was going for here.

The blame is not wholly mine, however: some rests with the publishers, or whomever composed the jacket flap copy: "In this exquisitely written book, an immediate bestseller in England, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads and sea paths that form part of a vast network of routes that crisscross the British landscape and its waters, connecting them to the continents beyond." I tend to avoid jacket flap copy, and that first sentence is admittedly all I read. But I could be excused for expecting a book about, well, Robert Macfarlane setting off on ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths crisscrossing Britain, a text exactly in line with my recent interest (inspired by The Wild Places as well as the books of Roger Deakin) in British rights of way and tramping culture. Macfarlane does set off on one such tramp early in the book, along the Icknield Way, but the actual thematic through-line is a quasi-biography of a certain poet, Edward Thomas, as well as a thesis on how memory, personality, and identity relate to environments and the experience of walking -- in his paraphrase of Thomas' lines of thought,

...self -- not as something rooted in place and growing steadily over time, but as a shifting set of properties variously supplemented and depleted by our passage through the world. Landscape and nature are not simply there to be gazed at; no, they press hard upon and into our bodies and minds, complexly affect our moods, our sensibilities. They riddle us in two ways -- both perplexing and perforating us.

It's all interesting enough when Macfarlane warms to these themes, but I don't think I forgave him for deviating from the path I'd expected to follow, and even his most evocative nature-writing felt lost on me.

Whether it was my own sense of disconnect, or whether this was indeed a lesser effort than The Wild Places, I didn't feel Macfarlane's prose was at the same level he produced for his debut work. His similes, while still bracingly original, often felt more strained than natural, and at times I couldn't quite suss out his meaning, especially when he left the ground for displays of philosophical scintillation. And this is a minor point, but I felt there's something disingenuous about a writer going off to Sichuan because he "couldn't think of anything I'd rather do" in one chapter, then in the next sneering about "trust funds." I'm sure it's great to be able to globe-trot on a whim while writing your next book, but having access to that kind of lucre should, as a rule, make it harder for you to offer "Trust fund kids, am I right?" comments.

2015 read #15: Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy by Karen Abbott.

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War by Karen Abbott
436 pages
Published 2014
Read from March 18 to March 22
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Historical biography is a different animal than capital-H History, a clade intermediate between history and historical fiction. Both history and historical biography have their worth and their points of interest. History (or at least history the way I like it) reports on its own uncertainties and the contradictions between sources, underlining when an interpretation is speculative or a historical source potentially unreliable -- not all historians are meticulous on this point, but the good ones are. Historical biography, on the other hand, goes all-in for scene-setting and detail, drawing sights and smells from various sources, inferring thoughts and states of mind from correspondence and subsequent memoirs when available, frequently approaching the narrative as an experiential third-person-limited point of view. Abbott refers to her "characters" in the acknowledgements, and in general is obviously trying to tell stories to their best effect. Historical biographies, the good ones, can be fully scrupulous about primary sources -- unlike certain chauvinist reviewers, I see no reason to suspect that Abbott faked details or indulged in "women's magazine" frippery, whatever the hell that might even mean in this context. But it is definitely a distinct genre of historical writing, with its own style and its own storytelling expectations.

That's all very broad and open-ended, of course. Basically I'm writing down whatever thoughts occur to me, because I'm too distracted to write a review engaging directly with the book's content in any meaningful way. Not that engaging with content is a habit of mine in this space, but it's more acute these days, for Life Reasons that I won't get into here.

More broad commentary: The American Civil War is fascinating in a dispiriting way, because it never really went away, as any number of bumper stickers and totally-not-racist Tea Party rallies will show you. Likewise, I'm always fascinated by the women who get left out of history books (which is to say, basically all of them), and their various means of asserting agency and articulating with their society. Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy exhibits a good (if small) sample of these stories, or "characters" if you will, each with distinct motives and methods of operation. It's a good (if preliminary) look into a part of history wholly unfamiliar to me, which is all I can ask for.

2014 read #50: West with the Night by Beryl Markham.

West with the Night by Beryl Markham
294 pages
Published 1942
Read from May 30 to June 3
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

A girl grows up in colonial East Africa, hunting boar with a spear and a dog, finding her way into piloting aircraft and running a bush air service based in Nairobi, before becoming the first person to fly the Atlantic east to west from England to Nova Scotia. There's no way such a tale should be boring, and much of Markham's autobiography is absorbing in a quaint sort of way, but she spends so much time dwelling on horse training and patronizing affirmations of noble African purity and extended commentary on the perfidious nature of Italians that any given chapter is equally likely to inspire yawns. It comes with the time period, I suppose. I would have appreciated far more anecdotes about her colonial childhood or the bush piloting.