Beck’s Books

Mr. Beck has a list of books he thinks are very worthwhile reading
Here’s some I’d suggest to supplement his (or, at least in one case, replace) choices.

[Links lead, either directly or through the Online Books Page, to online versions where available, or else to the relevant Amazon page]

Thucydides: History of the Pelopennesian War
It’s not so much a history of a war as an analysis of how the desire to dominate others ends up destroying everyone involved

Plato: Symposium
You may totally disagree with everything he said, but this dialogue is the foundation of at least half of Western intellectual history, and one of the great underpinnings of Christianity.

Machiavelli: Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
The Prince is the famous book, but this is where Machiavelli described his real political ideals

Shakespeare: The Sonnets
Milton: Samson Agonistes
Blake: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
Eliot: Four Quartets
What poetry can do, these did. The Blake, if possible, should be read in a copy that contains Blake’s original engravings.

Cao Xueqin: The Story of the Stone (aka The Dream of the Red Chamber)
It’s one of the greatest novels ever written, even if in the full translation it comes (in the Penguin Classics edition)to five volumes (the last of which was written by someone else after the death of the original author), with the added benefit that you’ll learn almost everything you need to know about the Chinese in Imperial China by the time you get to the end–which means learning a lot about the Chinese in modern China

Jane Austen: Persuasion
My personal choice for the greatest novel ever written.

Edmund Crispin: The Moving Toyshop
Dorothy Sayers: The Nine Tailors
Two of the greatest mysteries ever written. In the first one, not only does the corpse disappear, but so does the scene of the crime. In the second, the question is not only who the murder victim was, but also whether he was murdered at all.

Barry Hughart: Bridge of Birds
Tim Powers: The Anubis Gates and The Stress of Her Regard
What fantasy can be: intricate plots set into the midst of human history (early Imperial China for Hughart; 19th century London for the first Powers and the lives of the English Romantic Poets for the second Powers)

William Manchester: The Last Lion: William S. Churchill–Alone 1932-1940
Manchester intended to write a three volume biography of Churchill, but became too ill to write the third. Instead he wrote “A World Lit Only By Fire”, and we are the loser for it (which is why I’d kick it off the list). “Alone” is the second volume, in which Manchester focuses on Churchill’s “Wilderness Years”, and in doing so portraying the appeasement movement of the 1930s in damning detail: the elite of Britain acting on the premise that Britain was not really worth defending.

Simon Schama: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
One of the best histories of the French Revolution: the culture and society of France in the last third of the 18th century and how it produced the prototype of Soviet Russia and all other modern totalitarian states

There, that should give you enough to read for a week or so…

Footnotes in Gibbon

Mr. Beck muses on a passage of Gibbon:

This, ladies and gentlemen, comes with all emphases original at pp. 682-683 of volume I of Oliphant Smeaton’s edition of “The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire” (Modern Library — Random House). It precipitates this footnote:
“Socrates acknowledges that the heresy of Arius proceeded from his strong desire to embrace an opinion the most diametrically opposite to that of Sabellius.”
Do not, dear readers, confabulate this Socrates — the late fourth century writer — with the Greek sage of some seven-plus centuries earlier. I’m just telling you: Gibbon simply presses on as if one knows these things.

I too have Gibbon cum Smeaton featured prominently on my bookcase.
Good old Oliphant Smeaton, product of an age when Oliphant was accepted as acceptable first name, and not reduced to a halfing’s wonder–and he writes like it. He finds plenty to correct in Gibbon, but such is the progress of knowledge that his corrections need many corrections themselves–and sometimes Gibbon turns out to have been more right than Smeaton.

But half the joy of Gibbon is his footnotes, where he feels himself free (even more than in the main text, where his own opinions shine out on almost every page) to snark at passing pedants, praise obscure scholars, damn unreliable chroniclers and rhetoricians, relate a life history in one paragraph, consider whether an obscure city is located in this province or that province of what was then the Ottoman Empire or the fragments of Italy, or, in summing up the knowledge of that era on one topic or another, compress more information than might be found in some entire Ph.D. dissertations–the trimmings of a narrative that manages to cover the history of almost all Eurasia as it flowed over twelve centuries. The only real shortcut he allowed himself was to elide much of later Byzantine history on the grounds that all those scheming Byzantine emperors were much of a muchness. It’s a wonder that he kept it as brief as he does, and probably no historian of our time, even if they accumulated the necessary erudition, could come close to repeating the feat. It is one of the pinnacles of the Enlightenment. And that’s not taking into account his achievement as a literary stylist, a summation of the best the 1700s could offer, and a model for almost every writer for the next hundred years.

The Michelangelo Code

Benjamin Blech and Roy Doliner: The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo’s Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican HarperOne [Harper Collins], New York, 2008.

Take one Renaissance artist, add one set of occult symbols, and combine to produce what will become, with luck, a best seller. That the artist may have no connection to the code means little, as long as one can remain faithful to the recipe.

That, in essence, is The Sistine Secrets, which is presented as a non fiction book, but which is in truth a farrago of irrelevant truths, suppositions presented as evidence, some basic art history, and some whopping inaccuracies. The premise of the book is that Michelangelo, remaining in the traditions of Renaissance art, embedded a detailed iconography in his paintings–which in the case of Michelangelo is for the most part the ceiling and altar wall frescoes of the Sistine Chapel–but which, in the case of Michelangelo, were secretly derived from Kabbalah and covertly denounced the Vatican and the Catholic Church of his own day. There is more probability to this than anything linking Leonardo da Vinci to the Priory of Sion, but the proof quickly breaks down into improbabilities as vast as anything in the DaVinci Code.