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Of course you should read some Herodotus — who, around 450 bce, essentially invented the practices of history and journalism — but it doesn’t seem appetizing, does it. To get you excited about this fellow, you should first read Ryszard Kapuscinsky’s Travels With Herodotus. Says Kapuscinsky:

And so a person consumed, obsessively tormented by allusion reaches for Herodotus. How many allusions he will find there.

Like Herodotus, who walked across the known world in his day, Kapuscinsky was a paripatetic world journalist and seemed magnetically drawn to fascinating places at explosive and transformative times — in Ethiopia in the early 70s, for example, where he reported on the fall of Hallie Salassie. (His classic The Emporer is from that period). Travels is a reading of Herodotus mixed with Kapuscinsky’s own brilliant travel writing and journalism.

I’d highly recommend this beautifuly layered book: I’m re-reading it and enjoying it just as much as I did a year ago.

If you’re at all interested in history, photography, or just the human experience, you should check out Shorpy.com. It’s a quite thoughtful photoblog featuring a few archived photos every day, usually from the 1950s and earlier. The site ” is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.”

The book is Europe’s Last Summer, by David Fromkin. Here’s why:

For some reason, I’ve become fascinated with the First World War — known aptly still as The Great War. Last year, I decided to create a timeline about it, and used a “timeline” from the Wikipedia (really just a table of events and dates) to build it. You can see it here in progress. This has led me to read a couple of books, including The Somme by Martin Gilbert, The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman, and others. But all along I’ve been bewildered by descriptions of how the war started. In all accounts, there has been a huge missing piece that no one is willing to admit was missing: The assassination of a major political/royal figure in the Balkans as a start to the war, despite being a casus belli, didn’t make complete sense, and didn’t seem to justify the war going from a local (and relatively common) Balkans war to a “world war”.

Fromkin, a professor at Boston University, does a splendid job of unraveling all the tangled elements — and introducing recently discovered events — of the “July Crisis” of the Summer of 1914, and makes real sense of it. The book is short and stays on its clear path beautifully. It seems like a missing key to any World History education.

This week, I’ll start adding events to my WWI timeline from Fromkin’s book, and will seek him out too for other ideas. Fromkin also wrote A Peace to End All Peace — another brilliantly elucidating book about the end of WWI and the formation of the Middle East: More on that book on another day.

Memory may not be what you think: Both the ancient Greeks and other modern scientists offer theories of memory that expand far beyond our own brains. This book, “The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind” is a beautiful exploration of ancient memory and the radical transformation we went through as we went from communicating orally to communicating with the written word.