Non-fiction reading for those who liked Master and Commander
I might have mentioned that I blasted through the entire Aubrey/Maturin series (the 20 novels that spawned the Master and Commander movie) during my semester break?
I loved the books - but they made me realize how incredibly ignorant I am of the basic European Imperialism/Exploration Time Period. So I went looking for non-fiction, and found The Drake Manuscript - it's like a picture-book of a first-time European visitor to the Americas. And it made me want to read lots more, but - what a bloody huge time span and subject area.
Then I paid a small fortune in library fines renewed my library card for the public library, and noticed that they had a Free! Personalized! Reading List! service. With, like, a place to put what you want, followed by a zillion questions about writers you like (and hate!), subjects you love (and hate!), length and difficulty of books, all kinds of smartness.
I asked for some Napoleonic history, some books that synthesized huge amounts of information about interactions between cultures and social history, some that were about specific times and places, some natural history - and hey, what the hell were the women doing while the men were off sailing? I told them about my soft spot for first-person documentation (like diaries), and that I hate military glorification.
- A short history of progress - Ronald Wright
- American frontiers: cultural encounters and continental conquest - Gregory Nobles
- Archipelago: the islands of Indonesia: from the nineteenth century... - Gavan Daws
- Bound together: how traders, preachers, adventurers, and wrriors shaped globalization - Nayan Chanda
- Britannia's daughters: women of the British Empire - Joanna Trollope
- Fossils, finches and fuegians: Charles Darwin's adventures and discoveries on the Beagle - R.D. Keynes
- Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies - Jared Diamond
- Journeys and journals: five centuries of travel writing - Farid Abdelouahab
- King Leopold's Ghost: a story of greed, terror and heroism in Colonial Africa - Adam Hochschild
- Krakatoa: the day the world exploded, August 27, 1883 - Simon Winchester
- Peoples and empires: a short history of European migration, exploration, and conquest, from Greece.. - Anthony Pagden
- Sightseers and scholars: scientific travellers in the golden age of natural history - Stephen Bown
- The beak of the finch: a story of evolution in our time - Jonathan Weiner
- The first total war: Napoleon's Europe and the birth of warfare as we know it - David Avrom Bell
- The floating brothel: the extraordinary true story of an eighteenth-century ship and its cargo.. - Sian Rees
- The race to save the lord god bird - Phillip Hoose
- The remarkable world of Frances Barkley, 1769-1845 - Frances Barkley
- To rule the waves: how the British navy shaped the modern world - Arthur Herman
- Women at sea in the age of sail -
- Women sailors and sailors' women: an untold maritime history - Davis Cordingly
I loved the books - but they made me realize how incredibly ignorant I am of the basic European Imperialism/Exploration Time Period. So I went looking for non-fiction, and found The Drake Manuscript - it's like a picture-book of a first-time European visitor to the Americas. And it made me want to read lots more, but - what a bloody huge time span and subject area.
Then I paid a small fortune in library fines renewed my library card for the public library, and noticed that they had a Free! Personalized! Reading List! service. With, like, a place to put what you want, followed by a zillion questions about writers you like (and hate!), subjects you love (and hate!), length and difficulty of books, all kinds of smartness.
I asked for some Napoleonic history, some books that synthesized huge amounts of information about interactions between cultures and social history, some that were about specific times and places, some natural history - and hey, what the hell were the women doing while the men were off sailing? I told them about my soft spot for first-person documentation (like diaries), and that I hate military glorification.
- A short history of progress - Ronald Wright
- American frontiers: cultural encounters and continental conquest - Gregory Nobles
- Archipelago: the islands of Indonesia: from the nineteenth century... - Gavan Daws
- Bound together: how traders, preachers, adventurers, and wrriors shaped globalization - Nayan Chanda
- Britannia's daughters: women of the British Empire - Joanna Trollope
- Fossils, finches and fuegians: Charles Darwin's adventures and discoveries on the Beagle - R.D. Keynes
- Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies - Jared Diamond
- Journeys and journals: five centuries of travel writing - Farid Abdelouahab
- King Leopold's Ghost: a story of greed, terror and heroism in Colonial Africa - Adam Hochschild
- Krakatoa: the day the world exploded, August 27, 1883 - Simon Winchester
- Peoples and empires: a short history of European migration, exploration, and conquest, from Greece.. - Anthony Pagden
- Sightseers and scholars: scientific travellers in the golden age of natural history - Stephen Bown
- The beak of the finch: a story of evolution in our time - Jonathan Weiner
- The first total war: Napoleon's Europe and the birth of warfare as we know it - David Avrom Bell
- The floating brothel: the extraordinary true story of an eighteenth-century ship and its cargo.. - Sian Rees
- The race to save the lord god bird - Phillip Hoose
- The remarkable world of Frances Barkley, 1769-1845 - Frances Barkley
- To rule the waves: how the British navy shaped the modern world - Arthur Herman
- Women at sea in the age of sail -
- Women sailors and sailors' women: an untold maritime history - Davis Cordingly