Book Commentary
July 18, 2002
By Michael
I spent two evenings (a little while ago) rummaging about in the basement of a retired professor of history. He was a pleasant old duffer, and we came away with over a hundred books from a life-long collection. His wife had died and he was selling the house; it always feels a bit odd, or sad, when I'm on these kind of expeditions. Picking over the detritus of someone else's life.
Which, in a sense, brings us to archaeology, though there's more involved than that in Bruce Trigger's The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660. A huge double-decker hardcover published by McGill-Queen's back in 1976, it draws (critically) on the ethnography of early european explorers and missionaries, as well as archaeology and early recorded history. Trigger is intrigued by the conflicting motives of different groups within as well as without Huron society and revises some widely accepted interpretations on the way. Well-mapped and handsomely printed; unfortunately it looks too good to read while eating breakfast. I think I'll stick to atlases for that.
In non-fiction, I keep returning to material on the First World War. I just finished Fussell's Great War and Modern Memory, and I think our copy has already sold, and there was the first volume of Hew Strachan's massive work (still in progress) on the whole war. I'm very tempted to jump into Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War, but I'll leave it out for you folks just yet. So I haven't read it yet, but I keep pulling it off the shelf and leafing through. His argument is blunt and provocative: the First World War was entirely Britain's fault. "The result of the mistaken decisions of individuals who would later claim to have been in the grip of impersonal forces". A nice solid trade paperback, almost five hundred pages with the usual photos and maps and diagrams. I find it interesting that all these books on the Great War are coming out at such a time.
Just the other day Scott landed a whole pile of Classics Club hardcovers. They are very attractive little books, are you familiar with them? Grey cloth boards, black and red embossing on the spine; they cover a lot of ground thematically. These ones are in very good condition, as new I would say, and they look great scattered all about on our shelves. Just idly picking four out, there's The Iliad (Samuel Butler translation), Selected Essays of Montaigne (Donald Frame translation), Erasmus' Praise of Folly and Selected Short Stories by Chekhov.
You might be familiar with the Hamlyn logo on stacks of remaindered books in the front of Coles or similar chain bookstores, but years ago there was a Paul Hamlyn Books out of London which published some very fine work. Medieval Drawings is one of these; it came out in 1969 and I still see copies of it around every few years. It deals in drawings from european manuscripts from the 6th to the 15th centuries. That's a good length of time; attitudes towards drawing changed quite a bit and the book attempts to portray that as well as the enormous variety of line-drawing in that period. Everything from illustrations of allegorical poems to moralizing animal legends and pictorial guides to ethics. The reproductions are sharp and of a good size. No squinting here.
The Children of Aataeentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 by Bruce Trigger. McGill-Queen's University Press. London and Montreal, 1976. Two volumes, $120.
The Pity of War: Explaining World War I by Niall Ferguson. Basic Books, New York, 1999. $13.
various Classic Club editions, Walter J. Black, Roslyn, New York, 1970. $7.50.
Medieval Drawings, edited by M.W. Evans. Paul Hamlyn, London and New York, 1969. $30.