Rating: 8.0/10. Book about the history of coffee in El Salvador, a crop that has created a lot of inequality in the last hundred years. The history of coffee is closely tied to macroeconomics, so this narrative weaves in an economic history of the Americas as well. Coffee is native to Arabic regions and spread…
Category: History
Traditional Government in Imperial China (中国历代政治得失) by Ch’ien Mu
Rating: 7.8/10. Book about how the government and its institutions functioned during several ancient Chinese regimes: the Han, Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties. The author Ch’ien Mu (钱穆) was born at the end of the Qing dynasty and is considered one of the greatest Chinese historian / philosophers of the 20th century; this book…
A Story as Sharp as a Knife by Robert Bringhurst
Rating: 7.3/10. A collection of Haida mythology, interspersed with analysis of them, and commentary of how the myths were collected. The Haida are a first nations group living in the Haida Gwaii islands of British Colombia, and in 1900, linguist John Swanton from Harvard was sent to study their culture. He ended up seeking their…
God: A Human History by Reza Aslan
Rating: 7.8/10. A story of how the idea of God developed and evolved, from an anthropological rather than religious perspective. The author is from Iran and was born a Muslim, converted to Christianity, then converted back to a Muslim, so he is familiar with multiple religions. Humans have an instinct to believe in god, and…
1587: A Year of No Significance (万历十五年) by Ray Huang
Rating: 7.8/10. In the year 1587, nothing really major happened in China, but in a lot of ways, this year marks the point of no return for the Ming dynasty. Even though there’s still another 50 years until the dynasty collapses, it’s already clear by this point that the bureaucracy and institutions are no longer…
The First Emperor by Sima Qian
Rating: 7.7/10. Translation of a few sections of the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) by Sima Qian. The whole Shiji is very long, so this work only translates the sections relating to the Qin dynasty. Sima Qian is a historian in the Han dynasty court, but his role was to collect anecdotes about historical…
The Word Detective by John Simpson
Rating: 6.5/10. Memoir about how the Oxford English Dictionary is created. Author joins the team in the 1970s, after being a grad student in medieval literature. He reads obscure books from all sorts of genres to find new words to add, and often a lot of scholarly research and debate goes into settling a word’s…
Frozen in Time by Owen Beattie and John Geiger
Rating: 7.0/10. Tells the story of Franklin’s Lost Expedition both as it happened, as well as an archeological point of view where we piece together what happened. The two ships set off in 1845 to explore the northwest passage, spends the first winter on Beechey Island (near Devon Island), but then gets stuck for two…
Lesser Beasts by Mark Essig
Rating: 7.8/10. History of the pig, from when it was first domesticated, through their treatment by various different cultures, until the state of the pork industry today. The pig is unique among farm animals in that unlike other animals that are useful for various tasks, pigs are only raised for their meat. They are omnivorous,…
Waiting for First Light by Romeo Dallaire
Rating: 7.2/10. Book by Romeo Dallaire, a Canadian general who was head of UN peacekeeping operations in Rwanda during the genocide in 1994. I’ve heard of his name before since he visited my high school at some point, but I didn’t know much about the specifics. During the Rwandan genocide, about 800,000 Tutsis were killed…
A History of Canada in Ten Maps by Adam Shoalts
Rating: 8.1/10. Canada has a long history of exploration: to European settlers, much of it was uncharted wilderness. This book presents a bunch of expeditions in history that uncovered Canada’s geography, with dramatic storytelling of adventure and danger. In some way, it resembles “The Hobbit”, where a band of brave adventurers venture into the unknown,…