History In Books -- Fiction and Non 2

[Wilbur]

1 hour ago, Larry of the Lawn said:

I don't know if it's too recent for "history" but I've been re-reading Pynchon's The Bleeding Edge and it's a pretty remarkable timepiece for the cultural moments immediately preceding 9/11.  The characterization of the internet at the time and American urban life of that era is portrayed accurately, hilariously, and tragically all at once.

It was published in 2013 or 14, so clearly has the benefit of hindsight, but even ten/20 years later it doesn't feel aged or off-base.  I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen more examination of 9/11 and the fallout from it in fiction and art in general.

 

I think that William Gibson did a good job looking at the psychological fallout of 9/11 in Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History.  The event caused a kind of psychic dislocation in the American worldview that matches the Kennedy assassination in terms of modern critical historical faultlines.

[Zorral]

I'm not so sure about how successful that was, as a reader who was there, in so many ways, and who has always been friendly with Bill.  He's really good at where he's not actually involved in so many ways.  He likes that position - distance, big overview from afar that is about how we look now.  But I was here, and have been ever since, and his writing didn't work for me with that.

What those two events, Kennedys assassination and 9/11 had in common was the endless loops of what people didn't know -- just the image of what happened.  A picture can be worth a thousand words, but I really and truly swear that endless 9/11 loop was superficial only, and not what it was for us.

Then, well -- hey the response by Bush?  to put up enormous billboards on the sides of high rises here downtown, where I lived, less than a mile above the Towers, which I knew well, had even worked in them, which told us to get credit cards and go shopping as the best way to counter and defeat the enemy?  God I hated him and Cheney -- and still do.

Edited April 27 by Zorral

[Zorral]

Bones of 1800s battlefield [Waterloo] dead may have been dug up for fertilizer and for sugar factories rending the sugar from the sugar beet, which substituting for cane sugar became lucrative in Europe in the 19th c.  Bones from medieval battlefields and bones from Bubonic Plague death pits were also dug up, as well as the pits of the hundreds of thousands of horses and mules killed in the battles.

Bones of Contention: The Industrial Exploitation of Human Bones in the Modern Age by Bernard Wilkin and Robin Schäfer. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2024/04/28/soldier-bones-waterloo-fertilizer-sugar/

Quote

 

.... Today, archaeologists surveying Waterloo ask an important question: Where are all those bodies?

Since 2012, only two skeletons have been found at the famous battlefield in Belgium. An estimated 20,000 soldiers died that day, but very few graves have been discovered during active archaeological searches in the past two decades. ....

.... Historians Bernard Wilkin of Belgium and Robin Schäfer of Germany contend the bones of the dead at Waterloo — and those of many other battles across Europe, Africa and even the United States — were ground up to produce fertilizer for agriculture and bone char for filtering sugar. It’s a practice that can best be described as industrial-scale grave robbing.

“Bones of Contention: The Industrial Exploitation of Human Bones in the Modern Age” examines the removal of hundreds of thousands of skeletons from battlefields and graveyards, largely in the 19th century. That practice is believed to have continued into the 20th century, when bones of the dead from World War I — including those of Americans — may have been exhumed for industrial use. ....

 

 

Edited April 28 by Zorral

[Zorral]

Has anyone read these?  I never have, as I've always had too much else in the stack demanding immediate or at least asap reading.  I had wanted to to read The Year Civilization Collapsed very much.  And now I want to read The Survival of Civilizations just as much. I particularly want to read them as the first is one of the Big Befores -- the orange stinkin' pile and Covid, and the other After that -- though certainly as of this spring the courts have put the USA in full Constitutional Crisis, which has been glumly predicted and talked for at least a decade, but now everyone's strangely silent on that topic.

Cline, Eric. (2014)  1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed 

Sequel, (2024) After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/04/cline-collapse-book-history-armageddon.html
 

Edited April 29 by Zorral

[Wilbur]

6 hours ago, Zorral said:

Has anyone read these?  I never have, as I've always had too much else in the stack demanding immediate or at least asap reading.  I had wanted to to read The Year Civilization Collapsed very much.  And now I want to read The Survival of Civilizations just as much. I particularly want to read them as the first is one of the Big Befores -- the orange stinkin' pile and Covid, and the other After that -- though certainly as of this spring the courts have put the USA in full Constitutional Crisis, which has been glumly predicted and talked for at least a decade, but now everyone's strangely silent on that topic.

Cline, Eric. (2014)  1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed 

Sequel, (2024) After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/04/cline-collapse-book-history-armageddon.html
 

I have read both, and I highly recommend them to you and everyone else with an interest in history and its inflection points.

If you can get the first one in the second edition, with the additional author's notes and post-script, it is worth the effort.  Cline talks about the book, reactions to the book, and a couple of clarifications that are noteworthy.

Edited April 30 by Wilbur
second edition

[Zorral]

On 4/29/2024 at 8:06 PM, Wilbur said:

If you can get the first one in the second edition, with the additional author's notes and post-script, it is worth the effort.

I've put in an order -- though I don't have a window for reading it at this time -- and got the second edition as you advised.  Thank you.

[Wilbur]

10 hours ago, Zorral said:

I've put in an order -- though I don't have a window for reading it at this time -- and got the second edition as you advised.  Thank you.

1177 BC was a book that worked on my mind in a manner very similar to that of Guns, Germs and Steel, in that it showed me new information and information I already knew in a novel light, giving me new insights and ways of thinking about the subject.

You may not find it as eye-opening as I did, but to me, it revealed very different ways of thinking about Ancient Greece, unrelated and with greater depth than the sleepy appreciation I developed sitting in the comfy chairs of the lectures at school, with bees buzzing at the window and coy illustrations in the textbook.  So it was a subject I already enjoyed, but 1177 BC painted it in technicolor for me.

[Zorral]

10 hours ago, Wilbur said:

You may not find it as eye-opening as I did

That's why one reads these books -- to see things differently, to learn something not already known.  I am hoping for some more light on the ever elusive "Sea Peoples" among other things.  Also perhaps more information about the ever-with-them-history-begins, the Phoenicians.