Rating: 8.2/10. Historical novel set in Quebec City in the year 1697, when the settlement was just a small town on the frontier. The story follows Cecile, a 12-year-old girl whose father is the apothecary (similar to a doctor). Not much plot happens, rather, the novel is based on characters: we get to hear stories…
Category: History
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
Rating: 7.9/10. Autobiographical memoir by Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who lived through many important historical events in the first half of the 20th century. This book was written shortly before he committed suicide in 1942, feeling that Europe had declined irrecoverably and after living through two endless wars. The memoir starts with the author’s childhood…
A Short History of Quebec by John Dickinson and Brian Young
Rating: 7.3/10. Summary History of Quebec, from the first European contact in the 16th century until the present day. Before European contact, the natives were a mixture of farmers and hunter-gatherers who traded with each other. The Europeans first came to the region for cod, then the fur trade started in the 1630s. Due to…
The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton
Rating: 7.1/10. Summary Written by a history professor in 1938, this book develops a theory of how revolutions happen, using examples from the English, American, French, and Russian revolutions. The focus is not explaining why things happen, but drawing common patterns from these four revolutions to understand how a revolution generally progresses from start to…
Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician by Christoph Wolff
Rating: 7.8/10. Biography of baroque-era composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who lived from 1685-1750 and is considered one of the greatest composers of all time. He is well-known for being a master of counterpoint, as exemplified in The Well Tempered Clavier and The Art of Fugue, but also wrote a great deal of lesser-known church cantatas…
Coffeeland by Augustine Sedgewick
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…
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…