I just read some books. Rather than review or summarize them, I’ll just pick out one or two things from each:
The Good Word, by Wilfrid Sheed (1978): Mostly book reviews. Here’s a good line: “All available evidence suggests that everyone was trying to be witty in the twenties, just as everyone was trying to be authentic in the sixties. Each era is bullied by one temperament which seems like the only one to have.”
One thing I enjoyed about this book is how relaxed Sheed seems to be. He’s not climbing the greasy pole of success, he’s not worried about losing his job or his cultural cachet, he’s not fighting for eyeballs in the attention economy. He’s secure, and he writes what he wants to write.
The Hitler Conspiracies, by Richard Evans (2020): Despite its lurid title, this is a serious book of history/historiography written by a retired historian who’s perhaps most famous for shooting down a lawsuit-wielding Holocaust denier in court a few years back. The discussion of conspiracies about history has obvious relevance today, and something about it reminded me of how irritated I am at modern media insiders who are pushing UFO-space-aliens conspiracies. Particularly annoying was this recent post by economist and columnist Tyler Cowen labeling “the media” as “like a deer frozen in the headlights” because they were “not so keen to report on” a ridiculous UFO hoax. Dude has every right to believe (or, more precisely, to want to believe), but the when he slammed the news media for not treating an obvious hoax that was in a long tradition of hoaxes with anything other than mockery . . . I was reminded of the Chestertonian principle that extreme skepticism is a form of credulity.
In Defense of History, by Richard Evans (1999): After reading the new Evans book, I picked this one off my bookshelf and reread it. It’s a book about controversies in historical scholarship, with a lot of it being about the limitations and positive aspects of postmodernist trends. Back when I read this book the first time, I found it readable but hard to relate to. This time, it really came to life—it reminded me of lots of things we’ve been discussing in the past 10-15 years regarding problems in science and academia. Also he has some discussions of literary style in history writing which resonate with my thoughts on communication in statistics. In short: we try to write prose as clear as a window pane, conveying our data and findings directly to the reader—but it’s not so easy. Often, artful writing is an effective way of conveying complex ideas, whereas unplanned writing can lead to confusion. Writing is part of communication which is not just an add-on to research; ultimately it is part of research, as we are communicating to ourselves as well as to others.
Also this: “in his famous book Montaillou, the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie read the inquisitorial reports for different evidence and in many cases different facts from those quarried from them by previous writers. While they had been interested in the Inquisition itself, and in the Cathar heresy it was attempting to extirpate, Le Roy Ladurie was interested in using the incidential [italics in original] details the heretics revealed about their everyday lives to construct an intimate portrait of human relationships and human existence in a medieval village.” Cool! This is an example of the Speed Racer principle, that sometimes the most interesting aspect of a scientific or cultural product is not its overt content but rather its unexamined assumptions. To put it another way, sometimes you can learn the most from history by looking at it sideways, in part because there’s less of a concern about selection bias when you’re looking at a series of documents or events in a new way.
Evans continues: “Documents can be read in a variety of ways, all of them, theoretically at least, equally valid. Moreover, it is obvious that our way of reading a source derives principally from our present-day concerns and from the questions that present-day theories and ideas lead us to formulate.” As the statisticians like to say, the prior can often only be understood in the context of the likelihood.
Another thing. I learned that in historical research, the term “primary source” is reserved for statements, “documents and other material remains that are contemporary with the event they attest.” So a memoir, for example, is considered a secondary source, even if it is written by someone who was involved in the events in question. (A contemporaneous diary would be a primary source.) I’d just always thought of participants’ memoirs as a primary source, but, sure, I guess that a memoir is a secondary source. That was just a new perspective to me. I took a history course in college and I don’t think we read any primary sources at all.
The Book of the Month, edited by Al Silverman (1986): Mostly a collection of reviews and short articles about authors from the Book of the Month Club newsletter from the first 60 years of that organization. The reviews and articles are essentially entirely positive—no surprise, given that the purpose was to sell some books—put pure positivity can get exhausting at times. Nonetheless, it’s a lot of fun to see views from contemporaries on various classic and not-so-classic books, many of which I’ve read and most of the rest which I’ve read about.
Slow Horses, by Mick Herron (2010): Good mix of plot, actions, themes, and characters. John Le Carre with fight scenes.
Freedom’s Dominion, by Jefferson Cowie (2022): The theme of this history book is that when prosperous whites in the south have talked about “freedom,” this has included “freedom to dominate others,” and that this has been a consistent thread through U.S. history, continuing to the current day. Well-written and convincing, the whole thing is very sad.
A Meaningful Life, by L. J. Davis (1971): This novel was mentioned in a recent article by Jonathan Lethem; I was curious and got it out of the library and kinda-read it. OK, I didn’t read all of it, or even most of it. It’s hard to say exactly why I couldn’t quite get into this book, which reminded me of other novels from that era that I found difficult to read, for example the book Max Jamison by Wilfrid Sheed. It’s hard for me to describe this style, but I’m interested in this general topic of styles and conventions in minor literature.
“primary source” is reserved for statements, “documents and other material remains that are contemporary with the event they attest.”
I just read about a small “primitive” tribe in South America whose language is very unusual, not related to any other. For them to accept something as a fact, either the person has to have seen it themselves or the person telling it to them has to have seen it themselves (sorry about those pronouns!). Otherwise it doesn’t exist for them.
Having been reasonably close to the creation of a number of memoirs, I no longer regard them even as nonfiction.
” you can learn the most from history by looking at it sideways”
Good post but IMO this doesn’t work for me. No doubt, you *can* learn *something* from history by looking at it sideways, but you can just as well fool yourself into something stupid – like Holocaust denial – and miss the big picture badly. Think of looking at history sideways as analogous to squinting at statistical data. Its much easier to imagine things into it that aren’t there when you’re half sideways. People who trade on eBay soon notice that sideways photos are often deployed to confuse the buyer.
The big lessons of history that are brutally obvious, well understood, and often barely even historical are ignored frequently enough that just looking at them straight on is more than a lot of people manage to get right, especially politicians, who love to trot out widely failed policies because they appeal to less knowledgable people.
* In college I wrote a paper about Ibn Sina a.k.a. Avicenna, and was given a poor grade in part because I “relied credulously on secondary sources”, which was totally true. I guess I should have actually read his works — would have had to be in translation, but I guess that still counts — but that seemed like a lot of work. Anyway it was totally fair to be dinged for trusting what other people said, when his works were right there for me to read myself if I had just put the effort into it.
* “Slow Horses” is now a TV show, in which Gary Oldman is hilarious as aging spymaster Jackson Lamb, who hates his life and all the people who work for him.
* Jonathan Lethem, I had kinda forgotten about him. I loooooved “Gun, With Occasional Music” (which Andrew did not), and loooved “Motherless Brooklyn” (later turned into a meh movie with Edward Norton starring and producing; he tried to turn it into a sort of East Coast ‘Chinatown’), but Chronic City was a bit zany for me and I’m not sure I read any of his stuff after that. I know, I know, GWOM is also zany, but I thought it was zany in a different way that somehow didn’t bother me at all.
* The mention of the Cathar Heresy reminds me of a couple of days I spent biking in the Cevennes, a trip that was prompted by reading Tim Krabbe’s excellent book “The Rider”, and in preparation of which I read Robert Louis Stevenson’s excellent travel memoir “Travels in the Cevennes With a Donkey.” I’m tempted to put something here about primary sources — after all, Stevenson’s writing is a primary source about the culture of that area about 130 years ago — but I have no real point to make except that it’s a great, short travel memoir.
Phil:
Yeah, Lethem . . . I don’t think he writes good books. I think he tries his best to write the sort of books he’d like to read, but which seem “constructed” to me. I felt the same way after reading a book by . . . ummm, I can’t remember the name now, someone who often writes for the London Review of Books. I like his book reviews but I read a novel by him once, and it was readable enough, but it didn’t seem real to me, it seemed lifeless, just put together in some way, it’s hard to explain.
I bet I’d enjoy the Slow Horses TV show, but I enjoy the books enough that I think I’ll read them instead.
The Rider . . . yeah, I read that on your recommendation, and it’s absolutely wonderful. One of the best books ever. I mean, ok, not really one of the best books ever, but the best book ever of its type, whatever that type is, I’m not sure. It’s on the efficient frontier in bookspace (along with Bayesian Data Analysis and lots of others). I think I might have a post on it in the queue.
Update:
1. It was James Meek, he was the LRB author who wrote a novel that felt like he was trying too hard.
2. We watched the first episode of Slow Horses. Gary Oldman was excellent, just an amazing performance. The show was fine; it was very faithful to the book, so much that I can say that I didn’t get so much out of watching the show, although the experience was pleasant enough.
3. The Rider . . . let me just again say how great it is. A true classic. Anyone who has written such a book should be able to die happy. I’m only sad that books have been replaced by video as the primary on-demand entertainment medium.
On looking at history sideways{ how do you feel about meta-analyses that look at hypotheses sideways? By ths I mean that people often argue in meta-analyses that the data they use for some covariate is more robust for not having been the focus in the original study. I always look on that as a method to avoid (at least partially) forking paths since the original study wasn’t trying to find significance of the given covariate, so its incidental effect is less likely to be biased. I’m not sure I buy this argument in general.
On Slow Horses… having read all of them (and you will see some of Herron’s stylistic methods lose their allure with repetition, though they’re still worth it IMO), I am avoiding the series mostly because everyone tells me they hew closely to the books.
Here are a few, nonfiction at the top:
Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies (Wilson)
The Romantic Revolution (Blanning)
World Religions (Robinson and Rodrigues)
A Theory of Justice (Rawls)
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Nozick)
Indiana (Sand)
Erewhon (Butler)
Green Mansions (Hudson)
Harlem Renaissance: Five Novels of the 1920s (Zafar, Ed.)
U.S.A. (Dos Passos)
Native Son (Wright)
Island (Huxley)
Under the Frog (Fischer)
A Bend in the River (Naipaul)
Jump and Other Stories (Gordimer)
And thank you for your post, Andrew!
On looking at history sideways, or in this case bottom-up, check out Carlo Ginsburg’s The Cheese and the Worms — also about recovering everyday medieval life and thought through the lens of a heresy trial. Really pulls you in.