“The Old Regime and the French Revolution”, by Alexis de Tocqueville, translated by Stuart Gilbert, edited by A.P. Kerr & J.P. Mayer

320 pages, Anchor Books, ISBN-13: 978-0385092609

Many consider The Old Regime and the French Revolution to be nothing more than Alexis de Tocqueville’s “other book”, taking a backseat to his better known work Democracy in America. Readers who are merely interested in guillotines should look elsewhere, though: other authors had already covered the events of the revolution, and de Tocqueville does not duplicate material where he has nothing significant to add. Instead, he looks at a premise that other historians had accepted uncritically: that the revolution had happened because the people were oppressed. While oppression was not unique to the 18^th Century, why had the people overthrown their government at that time rather than another era? Prior to de Tocqueville that question had neither been asked nor answered in a serious way, so he delved into documents that no one before him had studied: archival tax records. Although such material risks becoming dense, de Tocqueville’s style is engaging and he keeps the purpose of the inquiry uppermost: What was the true aim of the Revolution? What was its specific character? Why did it take place and what exactly did it achieve?

The Old Regime and the French Revolution was ahead of its time, using methodologies that would not be reused by significant numbers of historians until the 1960s. De Tocqueville’s approach yields rich insights about any country and any era where bureaucratic archives exist in sufficient quantity to undertake a meaningful statistical analysis. This had always been a well-regarded book; for 50 years now it has also acquired recognition as a seminal work of social history. There is nothing else in the subfield that approaches it in terms of innovative analytical methods. For these reasons alone this book is of interest to anyone who wants to know how the study of history is done and why it remains in print in so many editions and why it is discussed in so many classrooms. We live in a world where political forces try to shape our future by telling us our heritage; this happens in all sorts of places while most people (even those with university educations) lack the skills to distinguish serious historical analysis from bullshit. That is a dangerous area to remain ignorant in where what someone wants is one’s vote.

“The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War”, by Caroline Alexander

296 pages, Penguin, ISBN-13: 978-0143118268

If you have even just a passing familiarity with the Iliad then Caroline Alexander’s The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War is a brilliant exposition of the story, the timeless themes it explores, and the various oral traditions that informed Homer’s written version…if, however, you have never read the Iliad, then I can't recommend this book to you, for without some sense of the original text to anchor you, it really becomes just a dry description of a story that you have never read and, therefore, rather pointless.

Alexander sets forth the view that one of the great ironies of literary history is that the Iliad came to be perceived as a martial epic glorifying war when it was, in Homer’s telling, a description of war as a pointless catastrophe that blighted all it touched, a perception that was shared by ancient poets and historians. It is a view, perhaps, engendered by Alexander’s own times, an era in which the point of war in Vietnam and Iraq is at best elusive and, no matter how often images of heroism and noble sacrifice are evoked, and the physical and emotional cost of war seems evident. But, I think it is safe to say, Alexander would argue that such a view would be perfectly cogent in the particular word in which the Iliad was written (or composed, or recited, or dictated, or whatever), the world of Greek colonists whose ancestors had fled from the Greek homeland in the aftermath of destruction and decline on the heels of the Trojan War. I should think it a mark of the genius of Homer (whomever or whatever you conceive “Homer” to have been) that the Iliad as a work of art can speak simultaneously as a heroic epic and as a lament of the futility of epic heroism.

But this more than a kind of glorified Cliff Notes as Alexander walks us, chapter by chapter, through the basic story of the Iliad, explaining as she does so the nexus of the god/mortals connections and the context of the struggle within the Greek bronze age, all in a clear, lucid style. If you are a Greek scholar you should probably stick to more rigorous textbook-style tomes, but for those of us just interested in the Classics, and teaching ourselves while reading alone, Alexander has a style that seemed to be some sort of process where I felt I was remembering the Iliad in a cozy moment while I was actually reading her book.