A Brief History of History: Great Historians and the Epic Quest to Explain…

A real disappointment. This would be an ideal book to give a high school student interested in history; the writing is informed but informal, and therefore accessible; and the (somewhat) juicy biographies of various historians would be a good jumping off point for a curious student. But, if you've had decent introductory college course on Western Civilization, the substance of this book is a waste of your time.

Based on the title and the publisher's description, I was looking for a "biography ... of history as a living idea". Instead, this book is a series of short biographical sketches, with much more focus on the subject's lives and personalities than their analytical methods or their intellectual contributions to the practice of history. There's essentially no animating theory of historiography behind this book, just a sequence of historians (and anthropologists, art historians, and archeologists) grouped either as heirs of Herodotus (credulous storytellers and anthropologists) or Thucydides (exacting analysts who focus narrowly on political and military events). That works as a rhetorical trope, but it has no power to explain the many, many ways different historians have approached the past based on their cultural contexts and personal convictions.

While most of the people Wells discusses are interesting characters, the book's lack of an overarching story makes their selection seem almost random - or worse, driven largely by present-day ideological concerns. So, for example, Wells spends a fair amount of time on Anna Comnena, Aphra Behn (an important writer, though not an historian), and Natalie Zemon Davis, and dedicates a long segment to Bartolome de Las Casas' struggle to win more humane treatment of native Americans at the hands of the Spanish Empire (a great story, but only tangentially related to historiography). There's almost no discussion of Marx or Hegel, and absolutely no indication in this book that China or India exist.

In part because the book's intellectual structure is so thin, it provides no roadmap to the evolution over the last century of historical studies in specific timeperiods, even though you can actually see different philosophies of history dominating the scholarship written about different periods. Just when the story reaches what in a better book would be the most complex and interesting part, at the beginning of the 20th century, Wells drops this footnote:

"At this point, it would probably be wise to point out that as history gets broader, so to speak, the process of simplifying it, already suspect on historiographical grounds, becomes even riskier. In other words, from here on in, more and more will be left out, for which distortion I hope a cheerful admission of my own profound limitations may serve as an excuse. At the same time, I trust the average reader's greater familiarity with recent historians and their work will at least partly make up the deficiency." (p.290)

Well, no. Give this book to an eager young reader, and let them enjoy it for what it is: a tour of some interesting lives from the classical, medieval, and modern worlds. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which is a page-turning tour of history's most influential historians. Beginning with Herodotus and continuing to the 20th Century, the author weaves a tale of explanation, interpretation and interesting prose that gives the reader a fun and informed overview of this vast subject.

This is the kind of book that might spark a layman's interest in history, which is my Big Thing, and yet Mr. Wells also gives some fascinating detail in places that make this a work to appeal to the more knowledgeable reader.

Each chapter marks a historical era and the most important historians of the times. Wells presents his selection of historians against a background of their own era, and also gives relevant information about the crucial cultural context that influences each. The style is conversational and the facts are well-presented, so that the narrative reads more like an interesting novel than a scholarly text ...

Mr. Wells is very self-deferential and yet delivers some insightful points that show a keen mind not overly-beholden to accepted "conventional" wisdom. This is the kind of book that makes one a fan of an author and interested to read more of their work. A fine introduction to a more in-depth way of looking at history. Highly recommended... ( )