List: history

Kaffeehauskultur. Tales of the Austrian in-group.

Berlin's Third Gender (Berlins drittes Geschlecht) by Dr Magnus Hirschfeld is a description of queer lives in Berlin around 1900 (published 1905). Even though it's naturally sad in some ways, it's also encouraging: Berlin was comparatively liberal at the time, and I enjoyed the descriptions of queer groups, events, relationships, and creative side-stepping of general conventions. The descriptions are very vivid and obviously well-researched, and contain lots of amusing facts about everyday life in different social circles.

My first non-fiction book in quite some time, The Victorian Internet is a nice introduction into the rise and fall of the electrical telegraph, and all its implications. Tom Standage shows us in an easy, meandering style how the world changed due to the telegraph, and how people changed (and/or didn't). While he's often very direct (or on the nose) about his theories, and some minor facts looked not quite well researched (Karlsruhe was never part of Prussia, thank you very much), I liked both the very human approach to history, and his final – if simplistic – comparison between telegraph an internet evolution.

This book was a great overview of the wider mediterranean civilisations during the Bronze Age, with a short discussion of the so-called collapse towards the end. I went into it expecting a lot of content about the collapse itself, and the book turned out to be 80% stage-setting. I happen to be into this, so it was a pleasant surprise, but depending on your tastes, this could also be less fun.

This book is a treasure! It follows the history of gay men's dress from the days of Oscar Wilde to the 90s, and by necessity along the way explains the cultural changes in and around gay groups. It explains hidden and implicit cultural meanings, is sourced from interviews, magazines, and lots and lots of other books and articles. I can't overstate how in-depth and conscientously the information is presented.

So viel au :( aber ein guter Überblick.

This classic (pub. 1969) on city development was extremely accessible to read, particularly considering the ugh field that surrounds economics for me. Jacobs' main premise is that cities don't arise as a consequence of agricultural settlements – cities are there first, and develop their hinterland to support themselves.

Primo Levi's way home after the end of WW2, from Auschwitz to Italy. So matter-of-fact that it reads as deadpan when Europe consists only of remains and confusion.

For once, I have nothing to say. This first-hand account of one year spent in Auschwitz is very calm, deliberately matter-of-fact, and inevitably painful to read.

Seb Falk follows the reconstructed life story of one particular English monk, John Westwyk, to show off how life and particularly science and research worked in the High Middle Ages. This means a lot of tangents, naturally, but it also means a lot of math and astronomy and nitty gritty details. While I didn't manage to appreciate all details about astronomy calculations, those were not hard to skip, and generally the book was very valuable, and approachable through its dedication to actual humans instead of anonymous groups.

Impressive and intriguing: Against the Grain tells the story of early state-building as a story of agriculture – that's not new. What's new is that James Scott has spent years aggregating the current insights of history and archaeology to paint the same idea from a new angle: What if early states did not naturally arise with the cultivation of grain – what if they required a food staple as grain (divisible, countable, and with a strict yearly cycle) to establish a bureaucracy?

I wanted to learn more about Christoph Clavius, the Jesuit who contributed significantly to the Gregorian calendar reform, which is a standing interest of mine. It turns out that this book intentionally avoids that topic, to talk more about cosmology and how the intellectual state of the art was just before Galileo happened to it.

All my notes are lost to a hardware disaster, so the tl;dr is just: material pop-science, fun read, drags on in places. Nice without being great. The chapters on steel and chocolate were great, the one on concrete could have been great but instead was grating. All in all cool info, presented well, if you can stand the voice. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Bringing Columbia Home is the story of the aftermath of the break-up of the Columbia shuttle, told by Michael D. Leinbach who was a launch manager at NASA and bore responsibility during the collection of Columbia and the ensuing review. I didn't really like the book – the author gave me the feeling that the book was more written for the people involved in the clean-up missions, both volunteers and professionals, than for an interested outsider like me. Some chapters feel more like a long list of names and their roles, to include everybody who did important work at the time, which was certainly important to those people, but at the same time a bit tedious. A bit of stylistic editing would have helped a lot here. I also felt that quite some things I'd be interested in (e.g. the concrete organizational consequences to change NASA feedback culture) were glossed over way too much.

Published in 1942, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry talks about his life, experience, thoughts and feelings about being a pilot in WWII, while on the defensive and with little hope of surviving. The novella follows one flight, and comments on both the flight itself (mechanically, strategically) and the war in general.

Liest sich gut und informativ, einem wird nur halt immer wieder zwischendurch dabei schlecht. Liegt aber am Inhalt, nicht am Stil.

A disappointing VSI book, this time around: light on substance, but heavy on the condescension. I'll list a couple of things that annoyed me (lest I start thinking I liked the book) and then some things I learnt: Annoyances “Even the word Europe is far from fixed. I shall use it to describe the westernmost part of a vast continental mass […].” – or write about Europe? Or call it Western Europe? A vast continental mass my arse. Uses so many words to say so little. I had hoped that a VSI book would be concise, and this is anything but. “In the course of the 14th century the religion born in Judaea, the offshoot of Judaism which for several centuries did not possess a name, became a growing and ultimately defining force—Christianity” – come on, really? Uses “barbarians” without qualification or irony (though at least not a lot). Notes Urban centres and commerce are later than I thought: England and France in the 12th century, Bohemia in the 13th and in the Baltics in the 14th century. Rennaissance people felt too high and mighty and so coined the term "Middle Ages" (gtfo Petrarch), and then the 19th century romantics rebelled against the 18th century enlightenment by celebrating the period (though also to go on with their whole nation state thing). In the Domesday book (1086), about 10% of the recorded population are slaves, and slaves and serfs are a established feature throughout the period, obligated to work on command and highly restricted in their ability to travel. Marriage tracks how far Christianity managed to take over culture, and how long it took to go from the Roman contract or the Germanic family enterprise to the religious/moral construct. Courts accepting the testimony of women give us unusual and early information on everyday worries, especially as they relate to relationships. Also, guild widows were allowed to carry on with their husband's work. Monasteries took their wealth not only from being given estates, but also from holding on to them over the centuries without having to split them up for multiple sons over and over again. (Makes total sense, but I never thought about it that way.) This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

This book came recommended by Seb Falk in the bibliography of The Light Ages, and it's also on the reading list of /r/askHistorians, which I trust a lot. I found this book harder to like – who writes sentences like “when the barbarian tribes took over or destroyed the Roman infrastructure” in this century? It was long-winded and seemed to alternate between being jovial and trying for jokes, and going for a more professorial style. Not only the style was uneven: I also felt like the assumed prior knowledge fluctuated a lot, and was sometimes left out entirely, and then filled in with excrutiating care at other times.

Tenured professors are just built different or something. The object of the book is Copernicus' "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres", which Prof. Gingerich set out to see all extant versions of (first and second editions, that is), and to compile a list of them including who they belonged to over the ages, and of their respective annotations.

Sehr trocken geschrieben. Der Band zur 1918er-Revolution aus derselben Reihe ist da ungleich besser.

This book was honestly, truly, terrible. I picked it up because as a history nerd, "where did this family end up" is always an interesting prompt. I had not thought that a single book could contain this amount of disjointed anecdotes, self-important injections, and – most damningly – humble and meek servility towards a dead monarchy. If I have to read books by monarchists, I'd prefer them to be stylish and clever instead of sleazy and obnoxious.