The devil is in the details

A new book

I just started reading a new book after having finished the previous one last night. The previous book was Preemption by Alan Dershowitz. I recommend it only to insomniacs. It was really mind-numbingly boring. I learned a little bit about Israeli history, but really nothing else.

Had I written a post about Preemption soon after I started reading it, I likely would have expressed a different opinion. The introduction and first chapter were extremely interesting, introducing many intriguing themes and questions that I was excited to hear more about. And then it became utterly boring and didn't really talk about the exciting things. So far, I've had the same experience with this new book Postwar" A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt. I have a rather romanticized idea of Europe, both generally and a little bit with the view of liberal politics and it was nice to be reminded of both the good and bad strands of recent European history. Hopefully the book continues to be this interesting.

Okay, so I know what you're thinking...a history of Europe since 1945 sounds dull and dry. To let you in on a little secret...all of the books that I recently purchased from amazon.com involve the history of a region since ~1945, which may lead you to believe that I am the boringest person in the whole world.

I feel particularly ignorant about that period of time. In history classes that I took before college: a.) the coverage of "the rest of the world" aka not the United States was extremely poor. But I did get to watch the movies "Gandhi" and "Empire of the Sun" and "The Gods must be Crazy". and b.) it seemed that we always stopped around 1945. I think there are a couple of reasons for (b). First, we were always running out of time in class and couldn't cover the material. Second, my teachers were around my parents' age and were thus born around the 50s. Most of the history since WW2 involves things that they lived through and perhaps think of as "current events" or things that they felt that they would teach in a more partisan manner. In any case, I feel like I don't know anything about that period of time. I took a lot of history classes in college (including one called "The History of the US: New Deal to the Present") but I didn't get much further chronologically in my knowledge (I learned about the sixties and can tell you about The Great Society, but that's about it.) I studied very little non-US history in college as well.

Anyway, I have always felt kind of drawn to post-WW2 history because it is something that I know so little about but also something that is interesting to me in a general history buff kind of way. I actually think that was why I got so much out of the Israel examples in Preemption...I don't really know much of anything about the history of Israel. As far as the history of Europe over that time period, I can tell you the names of some important people and maybe some important movements but I don't really know anything about them, so I am excited to learn about them. (Yes, I am a dork. So sue me). I hope this book stays as good as it currently seems.

Next up after this one....a history of Africa since independance. Maybe I should start trying to learn African geography now...

(I considered adding a list of all of the world events since 1945 that I could think of to show you how ignorant I am, but it was a little too embarrassing so I stopped.)

posted by Immunegirl @ 1:05 AM