I have read numerous history books that take, in some cases, an eagle's eye view of the world, looking down on all that has happened and summing it up in a few hundred pages, such as Gombrich's excellent Children's History of the World; there are others that have taken a single era or epoch or even a single year, and examined it minutely, looking at the famous people who lived in that time and what they did and the impact they had on the world - Dava Sobel's Longitude is a reasonable example.

However, I have never read a book that looked at shared histories, the histories of real, everyday people, and how their thoughts and actions are influenced by the weight of history that there is all around us. Zeldin's book is that book, a book that looks at the way people behave and then examines the historical reasons for these actions, a book that makes one believe that history is not what we'd thought it was. It is a real paradigm-shifter. ( )

A discourse, drawing on real lives, on how to lead a useful, meaningful existence ( )

A History of How People Have Solved the Problem of Living, January 18, 1999
By Jeffrey S. Bennion "Professional dilettante" (Arlington, VA United States) - See all my reviews


Everyone who's interested in history honors those who have lived in the past, how they have come to unique solutions to solve their problems. We try to guard against what C.S. Lewis calls "chronological snobbery" -- the notion that just because we were born later, we necessarily are smarter and wiser than those who have gone before us.
The older I get, the more I'm convinced that the ancients had it right all along. And this book is a powerful antidote against chronological snobbery. Aside from being truly uplifting, it's encouraging to see how people have faced, and overcome, dilemmas similar to our own. To see the many ways they have solved those problems is fascinating and liberating.

My only regret is that this book has received far too little attention. The scope is so wide ranging, the range of fascinating tiny details so vast, that it's difficult to review, and impossible to summarize, at least with my paltry expository skills. So just read it! And spread the word!

I've just begun Zeldin's An Intimate History of Humanity. He writes well enough: simple sentences and simple diction; doesn't hide indecision behind a lot of fluff. I like the meditations. They remind me a bit of Annie Dillard. And the seriousness of the themes (work=slavery; conversation between the sexes; loneliness) brings Thomas Nagel to mind. My only complaints revolve around lack of depth and direction -- the meditations seems to peter out rather than conclude.

http://nhw.livejournal.com/786755.htm...

I got this ages ago, as it promised to be an interesting investigation of the history of how humans relate to each other. Unfortunately it isn't; it is a series of conversations with French women, one by one, with an attempt by the author to draw universal conclusions from each one individually. I got through less than a tenth of it before I reached my "Tonstant Weader fwowed up" moment, when one of the interviewees confided that

"When someone broke her favourite teapot, she did feel anger for two minutes, but then she said to herself, 'Everything has a life, everything has an end.'"

Well, that was certainly the end for me. ( )