Looking at History

I've found a writer I thoroughly admire. He chases me to the dictionary pretty often, and I'm always pleased afterward because he's used precisely a correct word. His name isn't familiar to me yet, because I don't close the book and see it on the cover, it's a Spanish-shaped name, his family roots are the Spanish shores he describes about halfway through the book. Some of his footnotes refer to many other things he's published, but I may not be so pleased about all these former works, because he notes in the intro that this is a new venture, written in a big hurry to get down the outlines of the project while it was bursting in his mind.

In my life, I've complained about the history I've been taught, and sought for the bits I could find about what history really was, away from the Western-civilization-oriented way it was presented back in the day. Spent some time with Jared Diamond last year, to little avail. But this book was printed after 2000, it's named Civilizations, and its orientation is something I'm totally comfortable with.

I raved on to Dan last week about it, and he recommended a book by Tom Standage(?) called History in Six Glasses, or Six Drinks, and this is the writer who wrote The Victorian Internet which was great, and I kind of started to read it, but my hand just went back to the book Civilizations. I suspect that the drink-based book will be pretty good, but I've got to finish this one first, and it takes a while, with all the little trips to the dictionary. Well, one trip each fifty pages, at least. "topos" was the first trip. One of the others meant "living on the ocean".

Probably I'll have to read it two or three times, which I don't usually do. But I'm so happy with his orientation that I'm probably missing some large degree of whatever he really wants to present, just paddling along enjoying what I myself am finding in him. God bless the man. Fernandez something-something. He's a professor from Oxford who was at Brown University doing a project on colonial development, and that's when he wrote this; it was presented in a long series of lectures here in the States, as he developed it. He's got grasp; he's got background; he's able to present interestingly; and I'm so pleased. I'm gratified. This is the history I can pay attention to without constantly hedging and having reservations. He might not even be intending to write history!