Tuesday, November 18, 2008
I'm so dumb I have to read kids' books
I have never felt I had gaps in my knowledge of history so much as chinks of knowledge in my gaps. I've always looked for general world histories but they just aren't fashionable nowdays (even bluffer's guides are time period specific) and old ones like H G Wells are so long that I have never found it possible to read them chronologically. I really need a short sharp entertaining overview to links together some of my knowledge and give me a structure to build on in the gaps. It has been pretty difficult to find and I've come across some dreadful books ( Like "Great Tales from English History" by Robert Lacey). Finally though, I've come across a treasure which I thoroughly reccommend to anyone as badly educated as me (or smart people with children).
Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich- Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser (A Little History of the World)
This humanist linear history was written when Gombrich was 26 in Vienna. Apparently in the morning he would read up on the day's period from an encyclopedia and look at source material and in the evening he would write his chapter- all in six weeks.
This goes roughly from the stone age to the First World War. An immesnse subject tackled in a really warm and accessible way with such an economy of detail. Read aloud to brainwash your child with the principles of the Enlightenment and the rights of man.
His postscript is especially moving. Returning to the book and adding the note, that he was a young man when he wrote the part about the First World War and didn't see things as they really are...
This book is wonderful and recommended by Philip Pullman. Read it, feel like like you know everything and then buy Gombrich's The Story of Art (1950)
ThePoliteArt at 3:48 PM