My best non-fiction books this year have been .....

[Richard Tarleton]

Paul Ormerod's "Positive Linking". Like this distinguished economist's previous works, Butterfly Economics and Why Most Things Fail, this book unpicks how the world really works as opposed to how political and social planners would like it to or think it does.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

well i shall not read it this year but Genes, Cells and Brains by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose looks especially interesting ...

[vinteuil]

... looking accusingly at me on the shelves are books I promised I wd read in 2012 and never did -

Postwar: A history of Europe since 1945. Tony Judt
Journey of Man : A Genetic Odyssey. Spencer Wells

Meanwhile I have been happily reading and re-reading:

The Face of Battle: a Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. John Keegan
The Footnote: a Curious History. Anthony Grafton
The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century. Anderson, Daghlian, Ehrenpreis.
The Whig Supremacy 1714-1760 [vol xi Oxford History of England]. Basil Williams

[Thropplenoggin]

The Footnote: a Curious History. Anthony Grafton

I trust this comes with footnotes. It's meta-madness!


Meanwhile, over at The Guardian website's homepage sidebar, Dr. Y.U. Thropplenoggin prepares to give a masterclass on how to give a masterclass on something.

[vinteuil]

... :


The Footnote: a Curious History. Anthony Grafton

I trust this comes with footnotes. It's meta-madness!


:

... o, it does - lots of footnotes.

But also serious discussion of those Masters of the Footnote - Ranke, de Thou, Bayle

[amateur51]

... looking accusingly at me on the shelves are books I promised I wd read in 2012 and never did -

Postwar: A history of Europe since 1945. Tony Judt
Journey of Man : A Genetic Odyssey. Spencer Wells

To some, Spencer Wells is rather better known for his grip on more slippery subjects

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/objects/display.aspx?id=5515

[Flosshilde]

the wilful destruction of fine buildings and townscapes even before the attentions of the Luftwaffe.

And after

I spend far too much time here, & have rather too many started & unfinished books, to read anything I would want to show off about . Anything I've read has been mainly technical books about print-making & ceramics. The RA book 'Bronze' looked good, especially as the exhibition was very good, but it's so enourmous that I doubt that I'd do more than dip into it.

[amateur51]

And after

I spend far too much time here, & have rather too many started & unfinished books, to read anything I would want to show off about . Anything I've read has been mainly technical books about print-making & ceramics. The RA book 'Bronze' looked good, especially as the exhibition was very good, but it's so enourmous that I doubt that I'd do more than dip into it.

A cracking exhibition, Flossie

I'm hoping that Santa will listen to my pleas re the catalogue

[Flosshilde]

I rather regret not buying the paperback version at the RA - they don't seem to list that or the hardback in their on-line shop. Still, perhaps it will be available at that rather useful bookshop near South Ken station.

[gurnemanz]

All Hell Let Loose - Max Hastings.

[gradus]

Thanks for the reminder about Shirer's engrossing book, I wonder if it features at all in the reading for the history of the period that is taught these days in school.
Food in England by Dorothy Hartley is the most interesting and informative book I've ever read on the subject. I also enjoyed Christopher Hill's Puritanism and Revolution, a book I bought years ago and only just got round to reading.

[Roehre]

Thanks for the reminder about Shirer's engrossing book, I wonder if it features at all in the reading for the history of the period that is taught these days in school. .....

another Shirer which I admire, and from which I by chance read a couple of chapters, is his The Collapse of the Third Republic. An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 .

(And it occurred to me only recently that France's 3rd Republic and the Deutsches Reich [Kaiserreich, Weimar, Third Reich] are a kind of parallel universes: 3rd Republic 1871-1940; German Reich 1871-1945.)