History Recent Picks

January 2005

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	A land of two halves, by Joe Bennett. (2004) "The first public holiday after I arrived was Waitangi day. I knew nothing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the accord between the British Crown and the Maori that is the official founding document of New Zealand. On television I watched displays of fat brown men in tribal costume somewhere in the North Island sticking their tongues, paddling war canoes and waving spears at white dignitaries. It looked like a royal tour of Africa. And it seemed remote from anything I'd come up against in Christchurch." (Page 2)
	The new Chinese empire : and what it means for the United States, by Ross Terrill. (2004) "China-US relations was not the only arena in which Mao and Zhou turned weakness into a kind of strength. They also did it with the USSR and others. Mao bamboozled Nikita Khrushchev by techniques of hospitality like scheduling a summit meeting at a swimming pool (Khrushchev could not swim and did not enjoy sitting with Mao in a bathing suit) and serving him endless cups of tea (Khrushchev did not like tea). From time to time Mao would slip into the pool, leaving Khrushchev stiff and self-conscious in his poolside chair. Khrushchev never touched the Chinese tea, but his cup was periodically taken away and replaced with another." (Page 6)
	A brief history of Peru, by Christine Hunefeldt. (2004) "Aside from the Sun, the Inca people and local ethnic groups also observed... other natural phenomena: eclipses, thunder, lightning, meteors, and rainbows. As in other cultures, some of these phenomena inspired fears, worries or joy. When an eclipse occurred, people began screaming and crying, and they would beat their dogs to make them howl. The appearances of several comets during the reign of the Inca Huayna Capac were interpreted as premonitions of his death, and Huayna Capac himself is said to have had dreams and visions about the annihilation of his people and his empire. The Indian narrator Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti recorded that when the Inca when the Inca was asleep, he saw himself surrounded by large numbers of his soldiers who had been killed in previous battles. Later, Huayna Capac saw a stranger who gave him a closed box and rapidly disappeared. The box contained diseases that were to kill himself and his people." (Page 28)
	The serpent and the moon : two rivals for the love of a Renaissance king, by Princess Michael of Kent. (2004) "Despite the comforting words of the King, the Medici dauphine was not prepared to leave her future in God's hands alone. In her desperate need to conceive Henri's child, this enlightened daughter of the Renaissance returned to the beliefs and practices of medieval times, and subjected herself to the most repellent magic potions, even at the risk of making herself ill... Every day she secretly swallowed the urine of pregnant animals; the ashes of frogs; the powdered sexual organs of wild boar, stags, and domestic cats. She ate huge quantities of herbs crushed and mixed with her food and wine." (Page 199)
	The living unknown soldier: a story of grief and the Great War, by Jean-Yves Le Naour ; translated by Penny Allen. (2004) "'May I be pardoned, as I begin this account, for any past suffering I revive, any false hopes I awaken? It is the most touching, the cruellest story of the war that I tell, a story of the purest and most brutal symbolism.' With these words, Paul Bringuier, writing in the national evening newspaper L'Intransigeant in 1935, inaugurated a series of ten articles on the amnesiac soldier Anthelme Mangin. According to him, the man the newspapers called the 'living unknown soldier' had been discovered wandering the platforms of the Lyon-Brotteaux railway station on February 1, 1918, after a convoy of returning prisoners had passed through. From that day on he lived in asylums for the insane... and finally to the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris, where he died on September 10, 1942, without ever recovering his memory." (Page 1)
	Zulu : the heroism and tragedy of the Zulu War of 1879, by Saul David. (2004) "Wednesday, 22 January 1879, promised to be another hot, uneventful day at Rorke's Drift on the Buffalo River. Eleven days earlier Lord Chelmford's main invasion column had splashed across the drift and invaded Zululand... The officer in charge of the two ponts at the drift was 31-year-old Lieutenant John Chard of the Royal Engineers. Born in Devon to a gentry family said to be descended from Cedric, king of the West Saxons, Chard had had an uneventful career since struggling to pass out to pass out of the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in 1868... one superior describing him as 'a most useless officer, fit for nothing'; nor did his quite manner and unprepossessing appearance - short, bearded and 'stupid looking' - help to compensate for his professional failings. It was perhaps fortunate, then, that his duties at Rorke's Drift were far from arduous." (Prologue)

The Captain Cook encyclopaedia, by John Robson. (2004)
"Charles Clerks, who sailed on all three voyages with Cook, was born at Brooke Farm, Wethersfield, Essex in 1741, but was not baptised until 22 July 1743. He entered the Navy about fourteen years later and saw continuous service during the Seven Years War, 1756 to 1763, aboard HMS Dorsetshire and HMS Bellona. He was in the mizzen-top of the Bellona in 1761 when the mast was shot away, he being the only survivor from those who fell overboard as a result. He sailed around the world with Byron in the Dolphin, from June 1764 to May 1766. His description of the Patagonias was published by the Royal Society." (Page 61)

Generation kill : Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the new face of American war, by Evan Wright. (2004)
"Vigorous public ball scratching is common in the combat-arms side of the Marine Corps, even among high-level officers in the midst of briefings. The gesture is defiantly male, as is much of the vernacular of the Marine Corps itself. Not only do officers and enlisted men take pride in their profanity - the first time I meet First Recon’s battalion, he tells me the other reporter, who dropped out probably did so because he writes for a 'f---g queer magazine' - the technical jargon of the Corps is rich with off-colour lingo. The term 'donkey dick', for example, is used to describe at least three different pieces of Marine equipment: a type of fuel spout, a radio antenna and a motor-tube cleaning brush." (Page 21)

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