This Kind of Book
Talking with a boy today I realized I like history books with tremendous scholarship and witty writing on narrow topics. That collection includes:
The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero by Robert Kaplan
A Fez of the Heart: Travels around Turkey in Search of a Hat by Jeremy Seal
Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky (but I didn't like Salt, oddly)
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell, (lighter on the scholarship, but heavy on the fun)
And my absolute top pick:
Fortune Is a River : Leonardo Da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli's Magnificent Dream to Change the Course of Florentine History by Roger D. Masters
How Masters is able to pull things together through meticulous scholarship is amazing. Finding scraps of Da Vinci's sketch paper and putting them together, going through his nephew's bank records, all of it is amazing.
The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero by Robert Kaplan
A Fez of the Heart: Travels around Turkey in Search of a Hat by Jeremy Seal
Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky (but I didn't like Salt, oddly)
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell, (lighter on the scholarship, but heavy on the fun)
And my absolute top pick:
Fortune Is a River : Leonardo Da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli's Magnificent Dream to Change the Course of Florentine History by Roger D. Masters
How Masters is able to pull things together through meticulous scholarship is amazing. Finding scraps of Da Vinci's sketch paper and putting them together, going through his nephew's bank records, all of it is amazing.