Recommend me some nun-fiction plz :)

[secretsquirrel]

Try these:

An Intimate History of Humanity

and

Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

 

[Santino]

alex, please clarify what you mean by "sub-marxian", and could you also give examples supporting your statement?

By 'Marxian' I mean a Marx-style approach to history that perceives and characterises events as phenomena of a deeper, hidden structure. The 'sub' bit means I think it is much less interesting and well done than the mistaken but brilliant Marx managed.

As for Foucault's talents as a historian:

Foucault’s isolation from the world of facts and scholarship is evident throughout History of Madness. It is as though nearly a century of scholarly work had produced nothing of interest or value for Foucault’s project. What interested him, or shielded him, was selectively mined nineteenth-century sources of dubious provenance. Inevitably, this means that elaborate intellectual constructions are built on the shakiest of empirical foundations, and, not surprisingly, many turn out to be wrong.

Take his central claim that the Age of Reason was the age of a Great Confinement. Foucault tells us that “a social sensibility, common to European culture . . . suddenly began to manifest itself in the second half of the seventeenth century; it was this sensibility that suddenly isolated the category destined to populate the places of confinement . . . the signs of [confinement] are to be found massively across Europe throughout the seventeenth century”. “Confinement”, moreover, “had the same meaning throughout Europe, in these early years at least.” And its English manifestations, the new workhouses, apparently appeared in such “heavily industrialised” places as seventeenth- century Worcester and Norwich. But the notion of a Europe-wide Great Confinement in these years is purely mythical. Such massive incarceration simply never occurred in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whether one focuses one’s attention on the mad, who were still mostly left at large, or on the broader category of the poor, the idle and the morally disreputable. And as Gladys Swain and Marcel Gauchet argue in Madness and Democracy (reviewed in the TLS, October 29, 1999), even for France, Foucault’s claims about the confinement of the mad in the classical age are grossly exaggerated, if not fanciful – for fewer than 5,000 were locked up even at the end of the eighteenth century, a “tiny minority of the mad who were still scattered throughout the interior of society”. Foucault’s account of the medieval period fares no better in the light of modern scholarship. Its central image is of “the ship of fools”, laden with its cargo of mad souls in search of their reason, floating down the liminal spaces of feudal Europe. It is through the Narrenschiff that Foucault seeks to capture the essence of the medieval response to madness, and the practical and symbolic significance of these vessels loom large in his account. “Le Narrenschiff . . . a eu une existence réelle”, he insists. “Ils ont existé, ces bateaux qui d’une ville à l’autre menaient leur cargaison insensée.” (The ship of fools was real. They existed, these boats that carried their crazed cargo from one town to another.) But it wasn’t; and they didn’t.

From here.

 

[Brainaddict]

By 'Marxian' I mean a Marx-style approach to history that perceives and characterises events as phenomena of a deeper, hidden structure. The 'sub' bit means I think it is much less interesting and well done than the mistaken but brilliant Marx managed.

As for Foucault's talents as a historian:


From here.

I agree. He had some interesting things to say but backed them up with a horrible amount of intelligent-sounding mumbo-jumbo that - apart from anything else - ill-befits a supposed postmodernist who should be rejecting grand narratives.

But this is getting a little off-topic. Not that that ever stops urban from having a good argument I know...

 

[Santino]

But this is getting a little off-topic. Not that that ever stops urban from having a good argument I know...

Off-topic, is it? I'll tell you what's off-topic. You're off-topic! The whole freakin' system is off-topic!

 

[lobster]

if you want to read history, you really need to read some books on historiography first, to understand the writing of history, how it is done, and why. i would recommend michel de certeau's 'the writing of history' and michel foucault's 'the archaeology of knowledge' for that.

then for some history itself: peter gay's 'the enlightenment: an interpretation' (2 vols, and generally considered the most masterful interpretation of the philosophes), michel foucault's 'discipline and knowledge', and albert hourani's 'a history of the arab people'.

I will keep that in mind .
who said "history is written by victors and that the truth is never known" and
"History is written by the winners". ?

I find it an interesting area to explore because i believe history has a bias by default, what with status quo and "you must believe this and not that"

 

[SpookyFrank]

The Panda's Thumb by Steven Jay Gould is probably my favourite book non-fiction on otherwise.

On top of that I'd recommend 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell and 'De-Schooling Society' by Ivan Ilich.

 

[ebay sex moomin]

I read a lot of true accounts of prison experiences last year. Probably the most entertaining was 'marching pwder' by Rusty Young- the story of a cocaine smuggler who gets caught and does time in a Bolivian jail, where inmates actually have to buy their own cell.

failing that, the second volume of Jeffery Archer' prison diaries is a sledgehammer reminder of the depths that human suffering can plunge to... one time, he got served champagne, and it wasn't even properly chilled