The Year 1000: What Life Was Like At The Turn Of The Millennium

by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger
What caught my eye about this book was the unusual cover--this hardbound book is covered in tally marks, signifying the primitive manner of counting. The contents of this book are just as inventive at describing life in the year 1000 A.D. The authors use the Julius Work Calendar, a hand-copied manuscript from England's Canterbury Cathedral circa approximately 1020. The layout, they describe, is similar to the calendars we use today--twelve pages of vellum, one for each month. Each month's page contains, in addition to holidays and saints' days, an illustration of the work taking place in that month. These illustrations, along with a cataloguing system based on the Roman emperors, give the calendar its name.

This book is an accessible read that somehow still informs the reader about aspects of life in the year 1000. This was actually the first time that I had understood clearly the successive waves of invasion--Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Norse--that took place even before the famous Norman invasion of 1066. You'll come away from this book with lots of interesting historical, archaeological, and linguistic tidbits, as well as a clearer idea of Britain's historical timeline. For instance, the authors note that most sizable British towns have retained their names from the year 1000, and that allows us to learn about the towns' historical inhabitants. Place-names ending in -ham are of Anglo-Saxon origin; those ending in -by indicate Viking (Norse) origin.

If you finally want to understand the relevance of those Beowulf passages you skimmed for tenth-grade English, this is the book for you.

Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor

I am a huge fan of the HBO television series "Rome", a dramatized look at the Roman Republic during the turbulent First Triumvirate (the sharing of power between Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Marc Antony) and its aftermath. At the end of the series, we see Caesar's nephew Octavian assume the mantle of princeps ("head citizen") of Rome and take the title of Augustus ("revered").

Anthony Everett's Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor is the perfect complement to "Rome". It covers some of the same ground as the show in Augustus's boyhood, and then continues to the rest of his rule. Through the historical sources available, Everett examines how Augustus gained power--and how he managed to keep it, a task which had eluded his uncle.

The life of Augustus is a fascinating one because he presided over a period of great change in Rome--historically, his rule is recognized as the beginning of Rome as an empire. The revered Republic of the past was unwieldy for the task at hand and the Senate controlled by an oligarchic patrician class. Though a republic seems more democratic than a dictatorship, in practice the political class was small and wealthy. Julius Caesar gained his power, and passed it on to Augustus, through the populist channels of military victories, soldiers' loyalties, and reforms. During his rule, Augustus extended formal citizenship and voting rights to many Romans and Italians, such as provincials who had been thus far denied--siding with what he saw as the superior virtues of country residents compared to corrupt urban Romans.

While reading this book, it is impossible not to compare the historical events and figures to modern-day counterparts. The U.S. and Britain have been compared to Rome in terms of their imperial subjugation of client states, but by taking a closer look at the people involved, we get a more detailed picture. One instance of this detail is Everett's evidence of Augustus's obsession with sexual and family morality. He enacted draconian laws to ensure his nation's virtue, stipulating remarriage for divorcees and widows, and disallowing single people from inheritances. He put his own daughter under exile and house arrest for the rest of her life in a remote city when he heard rumor of her adultery. In his tyrannic laws and rhetoric, he appealed to the "good old days" of the early republic, when life was simpler--doesn't that sound exactly like something we would hear today?

Most strikingly, in one a concluding chapter, Everett states that Augustus was keenly aware that "in the long run, power was unsustainable without consent, and that consent could best be won by associating radical constitutional change with a traditional and moralizing ideology". This sounds exactly like the neoconservative agenda to me--except Augustus's dictatorship might actually have been more benevolent.

Everett's history is lifelike and fast-paced, full of the small details that allow us to feel a part of the action. I read almost all of this 300-something-page book in one sitting on a Friday night--I call that a recommendation.

The Little Book

The Little Book, by Selden Edwards

I picked up Selden Edwards’ novel “The Little Book” as a respite from the bleak worlds I had entered in my last several reads. Wheeler Burden, our story’s center, is a rock star, an author, last in the line of a wealthy Boston family. Mysterious events transport him from San Francisco in 1988 to Vienna in the year 1897, where he finds himself in the midst of a cultural revolution every bit as big as the Woodstock generation he was a celebrated part of.

Once Wheeler arrives in Vienna, we learn more about his past, from his English-born mother who raises him on a California farm, to his upper-crust grandparents, his war-hero father, and the Austrian tutor who mentored him. And not only do we learn more about Wheeler’s past, we learn about these characters’ pasts—their stories center around Vienna in 1897, and intermingle with his own in complicated and emotional ways.

Learning the backstories of each character lends both suspense and depth to this novel. The interest of the plot and the characters is deepened by the detailed history of Europe at the turn of the century. The heady mix of cultural forces in fin de siècle Vienna is even weightier because of Wheeler’s knowledge of the coming events of the twentieth century. In 1897, Freud is starting his career and is only in process of formulating his seminal theories; Hitler is a child in a small German town; the seeds of World War I are being sown by Kasier Wilhelm; and the anti-Semitism that came to a head in World War II is starting to solidify.

I am big fan of books like these because they combine the best of two worlds—a compelling and enjoyable story set in a detailed historical setting. It lets me learn about things like European history without having to slog through an actual history book—I am doing this in my free time, after all.