Favorite April 2023 Read
ConversazioniReaders Over Sixty
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2Tess_W
My favorite read was Anne Easter Smith's The King's Grace. It is based on the life of Grace Plantagenet, one of eleven of Edward IV's illegitimate children.
3TempleCat
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is, by far, the best book I have read in a long long time. TBH, I am still in the middle of reading it - it's 526 pages of text, 83 pages of notes and has a bibliography that's 62 pages long, all in small print. This is going to be my favorite read for more months than just the last!
In a nutshell, the authors, an anthropologist and an archeologist, dive deeply into the standard scholarly views of the history of the development of civilization (savage -> hunter-gatherer -> farmer -> development of cities & leisure time -> …. etc.) and revisit those accepted truths using a data-driven approach. They expose how much bias and egocentrism is behind those "accepted truths" (For example, Rousseau's noble savage vs Hobbes' short, nasty and brutal views of indigenous culture, Roman and Greek classicism as the "ideal" societies, languages, etc. during certain periods), how variable and creative people have actually always been in organizing their societies and how they actually affected each other (renaissance Europe was highly influenced by the political commentary of North American indigenous sages, e.g.!)
I've always been skeptical of such sweeping views of cultural and societal development - they didn't match up with my own experience with that fascinating species, the human animal, who I've felt has always been more brilliantly inventive than commonly depicted in history of civilization narratives. Now I've found a scholarly text that goes far beyond simply supporting some of my naive views - it's giving me a whole new picture to think about!
In a nutshell, the authors, an anthropologist and an archeologist, dive deeply into the standard scholarly views of the history of the development of civilization (savage -> hunter-gatherer -> farmer -> development of cities & leisure time -> …. etc.) and revisit those accepted truths using a data-driven approach. They expose how much bias and egocentrism is behind those "accepted truths" (For example, Rousseau's noble savage vs Hobbes' short, nasty and brutal views of indigenous culture, Roman and Greek classicism as the "ideal" societies, languages, etc. during certain periods), how variable and creative people have actually always been in organizing their societies and how they actually affected each other (renaissance Europe was highly influenced by the political commentary of North American indigenous sages, e.g.!)
I've always been skeptical of such sweeping views of cultural and societal development - they didn't match up with my own experience with that fascinating species, the human animal, who I've felt has always been more brilliantly inventive than commonly depicted in history of civilization narratives. Now I've found a scholarly text that goes far beyond simply supporting some of my naive views - it's giving me a whole new picture to think about!
4Tess_W
>3 TempleCat: This goes on my WL!
5TempleCat
>4 Tess_W: What does WL mean?
7mnleona
Reading Elizabeth Peters The Mummy Case.
9kayclifton
My favorite was The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington published in 1918. I also borrowed a DVD of the film version from a library to compare the two.
