(Untitled)

[bookelfe]

Sometimes I read a book and I'm like "that book was super informative! That . . . is not actually the information I was looking for. Better prose would have been helpful."

That is how it went for me with The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. What I wanted: a social and cultural history of the Spanish flu and how

Comments

[bookelfe]

Hahaha yeeeeeah. I mean, you know, I'm fine with a researcher not being able to cover all of everything. Global is a lot, it's hard to cram it all into one book! Just, you know, if you're only interested in part of the world, tell me that instead of pretending you're covering the important bits and it's just not even worth mentioning the rest.

[bookelfe]

I would love to read a "global" book that focused on somewhere besides the USA or Europe and gave the West a passing 'and also this' mention! It would be so refreshing.

(Although to be fair I fully believe these books do exist, just in languages I do not read.)

[bookelfe]

Ooh, that looks really interesting. Thank you for the rec!

[maladaptive]

The variant I'm more familiar with is GLOBAL HISTORY OF THE ANCIENT WORLD (actually just Greece, Rome, maybe Egypt, maybe the Near-East).

So I wanted an archaeology degree.

Bryn Mawr only offered archaeology of the classical world and the Middle East.

So I got an anthropology degree, which led to such situations as a project in geoarchaeology where we broke up into groups based on what our final papers would be on, and I ended up essentially babysitting all the archie students doing anything with human remains because I was the only one who had ever had a class that touched on human remains. I figured the Egypt kids at LEAST studied how to properly exhume a mummy, but no (I mean, we shouldn't really be exhuming mummies in the first place but let's ignore that subject since westerners like to do it anyway, so they could at least do it right). ...To be fair, I don't have experience with actually doing it, specifically, but I know about studying remains and I've actually wrestled with the "how do we do it" question. Unlike them

[bookelfe]

Ugh! FRUSTRATION.

[maladaptive]

It was kind of nice because I think anthropology is really where I belonged for all the social stuff, but it was SO WEIRD. I took paleoarchaeology which was all about the history of the north of North America (awesome!), Chinese archaeological history, and Inca and their ancestors... and yet, no archie credit except for paleo.

The Inca and their ancestors professor went to South America and was interviewed for a Nat Geo documentary! How does that not qualify.