"History" turned book-review.

History is pretty neat stuff. I never really paid much attention to it in school -- probably because you couldn't "figure out" history, you couldn't memorize a few basic axioms and some formulas and then derive the rest of it using short cuts, you sort of had to pay attention -- I was much too lazy for that. Plus, I think, I got a lot of poor exposure to it in school, so history just seemed like a terribly boring subject. But, nowadays, I just can't seem to get enough of it -- I'm just fascinated by the history of everything.

I especially like histories of things about which I have a smattering of "popular American culture" knowledge but, when I learn more about it, I find out that I pretty much had it all wrong, and the few bits I did have right were the boring bits, and there's so much more interesting, rich stuff to know. The classic example that I typically give is the bit about how those savage American Indians were constantly beating the crap out of the poor, innocent settlers who wanted nothing more than to quietly go about their business.

Of course, their business was conquering the new world, and its kind of hard to do that quietly. Or innocently. But such was the initial history I was taught (maybe I wasn't paying attention during some important bits, but thats certainly what I got out of it, the first time around), and I pretty much swallowed it, as presented.

Vicki (my wife) and I are currently reading Ideas: A History Of Thought And Invention From Fire To Freud, and I'm totally digging it. We read to each other at night, before bed, so it's slow going as (a) reading aloud is slow (b) we stop a lot to talk about this or that which comes up in the book and (c) all this slow, interrupted reading happens late at night, in bed, so we're tired. So we only make a handful to a dozen pages a night, but it's fun & interesting and I really like he book.

One of the things that I like about it is that it has prompted me to consider a time when even the most mundane, "we take this for granted" things were not widely known, and what constituted a "revolutionary breakthrough", back in those days. One example of this is: there was a time in man's history when the connection between sex and babies wasn't widely known. Back then, the fact that women occasionally popped-out babies was seen as somewhat miraculous, which is why the earliest religions centered around women, motherhood & birth -- they were seen as goddesses, those who could create more humans! "Big whoop!", we say, nowadays, as everyone pretty-much understands the process but, back then, it was this complete god-like mystery. The other one I like is the "invention" of square houses. Early on, one's "house" was basically a fire-pit in the middle with then a rather crude structure extending around it to a radius of where the useful heat was. Think "tee-pee", only 10s of 1000s of years less-advanced. Then, as man started gathering into villages and communities and started hoarding food, firewood and whatnot, somebody figured out that they could store a lot more stuff in their house if they "filled out the corners", to square them against the space of their neighbor's houses. So, one day, everyone's trying to jam more & more food-for-Winter into their increasingly cramped round-houses when, the next day, the genius of the bunch figured out how to get a few extra square feet out of his area.

My friends think I'm nuts (or, really, just boring) to get so excited about this, but I think it's really cool to imagine all the other folks gathering around and saying "wow, Og! Nice one...!", and then rushing home to make their houses bigger, too.

I realize that history has a lot more interesting stuff to offer, but following along the REALLY ancient stuff, the sort of "pre-history history", is really neat, to me.

Learning more about the ancient Greeks is cool, too, as is learning a bit about the history of Palistine & Isreal from a different perspective, or the way that Europe, the Middle East and the Far East sort of did many things in parallel, but also diverged in many areas. But that's all stuff that I sort of knew a little about, and now I'm just learning more about it -- so that's nice and all, but getting a peek into the life of prehistoric man really gets my geek on.

(Tangent: Does that count as ending a sentence in a preposition? I think not, because "to get one's geek on" is a verb. Hmmm. But then I'd have to make the same exception for "gets my dander up", and that doesn't seem right...)

At any rate, we're really enjoying the book -- even though there are parts of it that make us say "hey, wait a minute! We need to double check that...", as it goes strongly against stuff that we both feel pretty strongly that we were taught "right" differently.

So I wonder if it's history that I like so much, or anthropology. Except that anthropology seems a lot like figuring out the history from other clues -- very cool stuff in its own right! -- but the thing that I've been more excited about, lately, is the actual "answer", the history, itself.

Of course, all of this means that my book-list just gets longer & longer every night -- "read-up on Homerian-era Greece", "learn more about pre-Ottoman Turkish empires", "learn more about Arthurian times, but from a non-English perspective", etc., my little notebook is practically bursting with "to read" items...

<sigh> Still, it's pretty fun stuff. If you have any interest in this kind of thing at all, I can recommend Ideas as a good kicking-off point. It's 800+ pages, so tough to hold up when you're laying down for long periods, but very approachable and, if you don't stop to gab about it ever third paragraph, or read it in longer than 20 min stretches, you'll probably breeze through it...

Heh, maybe I'll do a movie review, next.