Halfway down the Danube

Two Good Books

When I was in the US over New Year's, I picked up some books. I would have liked to pick up more, but there was only so much room in the suitcase. (I pulled a muscle as it was.)

Since the kids are (cross fingers!) not sick any more, I've had a little time for reading. Last night I managed to finish Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson.

This is a... really good book, though it may not be to everyone's taste. It's a historical novel about the early days of the Scientific Revolution, from about 1660 to 1688. It's eight hundred pages long. There are quite a lot of digressions... most of them, I think, fascinating. The main characters are fictional, but Newton, Hooke, Leibniz, King Charles II of England and Louis XIV of France all play major roles.

And it's really funny, though some of the humor is rather dry, and some is very black indeed.

I can't do this book justice in a blog post, but if you like historical novels, or just want a really long book that's intellectually challenging but also entertaining and fun, check this out.

Then: I'm about half way through Paris 1919, by Margaret MacMillan, and I'm liking it a lot. It's a fairly straightforward history book about the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War, which led to the Treaty of Versailles. Since the book is only 450 pages or so, it has to skim a little (it's a huge topic), but it manages to cover most of the important points with verve and an eye for the telling detail.

There's a complete chapter on Romania, by the way -- a short one, but well worth a look. The author clearly has a very low opinion of Ion Bratianu, the Romanian Prime Minister; she has damning quotes about him from various delegates ("Bratianu is a bearded woman, a forceful humbug, a Bucharest intellectual, a most unpleasing man... He makes elaborate verbal jokes, imagining them to be Parisian.") There's a particularly pithy one from Romania's Queen Marie: "A tiresome, sticky and tedious individual."

Marie was entitled to a cheap shot or two; if anyone made sure of Romania's gains in 1919, it was her. She charmed Lloyd George and Clemenceau (though she alienated the straitlaced Woodrow Wilson by talking about love, and then arriving half an hour late to lunch), provided a welcome distraction to bored reporters, and overall made a much more positive impression than the histrionic Bratianu.

One detail that seems to catch every reader's eye: the author asserts that, before the First World War, officers in the Romanian Army were quite fond of wearing makeup. Since the rest of the book seems pretty well researched, I'm willing to consider this, but I'd like to see some collaboration before accepting it. I've read one book on Romania in the First World War, and this quirk was not mentioned; on the other hand, it was a book of political and military history, and didn't much discuss issues of culture or, um, fashion.

Anyhow. There are also individual chapters for Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Czecheslovakia, Poland, and the Arab Middle East, among others. This is an interesting way to organize the material... and it also makes it a very convenient read for parents with small children, who may only have a few minutes here and there!

_Paris 1919_ is a very good book, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys history.

Next up: _The Uprising_ ("Rascoala") by Liviu Rebreanu. I'm trying to catch up on my Romanian reading...

Posted by douglas at January 15, 2004 09:42 PM | TrackBack