Vienna, 1935, and a young man called Ernst Gombrich has just completed his university degree. Desperate for work, he accepts a publisher’s offer to translate into German a popular history book for English children.
After assessing the text, Gombrich tells the publisher, Walter Neurath, (later the founder of Thames and Hudson) that “I think I could write a better one myself”. Neurath is bemused by Gombrich’s response, but says the 25-year-old is welcome to submit a sample chapter.
When Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser (A Little History of the World for Young Readers) was published in 1936, it received positive reviews and was later translated into five other languages.
Gombrich, who moved to England in that same year, did not revisit the book until the 1990s. He was nearing the end of his life and felt it was time to reconsider some aspects of the story he had told, as well as include his own reflections about the eventful 20th century he’d witnessed.
“I want to stress,” Gombrich once wrote, “that this book is not, and never was, intended to replace any textbook of history that may serve a very different purpose at school. I would like my readers to relax, and to follow the story without having to take notes or to memorise names and dates.”
Gombrich is a master storyteller. His most famous book, The Story of Art (1950) has become one of the world’s most important visual art resources.
I suspect this new illustrated edition of A Little History of the World will also prove to be a hit among those who prefer a well-written history book to the sometimes inaccurate jumble of information we find on the internet.
In recent months there has been a boom in history books, with many local and international publishers backing their historians’ investigations with an elegantly designed product.
Possibly the recent surge in e-book sales is partly responsible; unlike
fiction, which can be read very comfortably on an electronic device, a history book depends so much on a decent presentation of photographs, letters, paintings, manuscripts and ephemera.
Thankfully, today’s publishers, are spending money on paper stock, colour plates, good design and printing. Looking at this year’s history books, the investment is paying off.
A LITTLE HISTORY OF THE WORLD (ILLUSTRATED EDITION)
by E. H. Gombrich
» $34.95 (Yale University Press)
“All stories begin with ‘Once upon a time’, and that’s what this story is all about: what happened once upon a time.” And with that, Austrian-born E. H. Gombrich, who died in 2001, takes his reader on an event-packed spin through more than 2000 years of humanity. One of the early chapters – “The Greatest Inventors of All Time” – examines the impact of fire, tools, language, painting and metal on the people of the Ice Age and Stone Age. This idea of using themes and inventions and new ideas to track man’s development continues as we romp through Greek and Roman history (the rise of democracy, philosophy, architecture, theatre, forming armies and political structures) to the impact of the major religious leaders such as Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad, through the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the church wars, the revolutions of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, the industrial age – and onward. This is a must for every family bookshelf.
A HISTORY OF ANCIENT BRITAIN
by Neil Oliver
» $45 (Orion)
Archaeologist and historian Neil Oliver is one of our favourite BBC presenters. Trust us: vision of him tramping around the windswept moors of Yorkshire or climbing the ruins of a mediaeval Scottish castle is known to cause clever, history-loving women to swoon. At first glance, his new book on what happened in Britain over its first 500,000 years may lack pizzazz. Read on, however, and Oliver’s constant amazement over the archaeological treasure chest that is Great Britain proves infectious. “The depth of history in Britain is remarkable,” he writes, “and not necessarily repeated everywhere. Britons are walking every day upon the very stuff of their own history as people.” Oliver divides his study into eight chapters: Ice; Ancestors; Cosmology; Bronze; Iron; Warriors; Invasion; and Romans. “A fine introduction, and an excellent encouragement to get out and see some of the places under discussion,” the BBC’s History Magazine declared recently. We agree.
AUSTRALIANS: EUREKA TO THE DIGGERS
by Thomas Keneally
» $59.99 (Allen and Unwin)
Booker and Miles Franklin winner Thomas Keneally follows up his successful 2009 Australians: Origins to Eureka with this next instalment. The story of what happened after the gold rush era until World War One is one Keneally relishes; he is intrigued by the circumstances that lead to the formation of an Australian identity, the rise of political and union entities, the birth of a nation and a growing patriotism. But for Keneally, the story’s magic lies in the experiences of real people. “What I am trying to present in these pages is the narrative of men and women struggling with the histories in which they are stuck,” he writes, “Histories in which some perish, histories which others endure, histories through which some dance.” The purpose of the book, he adds, is to take the reader “inside the very flesh and breath and passion of Australian life in the past”.
LENINGRAD: TRAGEDY OF A CITY UNDER SIEGE 1941-44
by Anna Reid
» $49.99 (Bloomsbury)
In her new book, eminent British historian Anna Reid reminds us that at the heart of every great historic event is the first-hand evidence of the people involved. “The final point in retelling the story of the siege of Leningrad,” she writes, “is not to restore to view an overlooked atrocity, strip away Soviet propaganda or adjust the scorecards of the great dictators. It is, like all stories of humanity in extremis, to remind ourselves of what it is to be human, of the depth and height of human behavior.” Hitler’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 started with the campaign to capture Leningrad. The Fuehrer did not anticipate the strong resistance he met and, after withdrawing his troops to the city’ outskirts, he then decided to starve it of supplies, food and support. Reid’s utterly compelling story is a summer read must for those who love gripping World War Two stories.
THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES: ILLUSTRATED EDITION
by Edmund de Waal
» $45 (Chatto and Windus)
One of 2011’s bestsellers, The Hare With Amber Eyes is now available in a hardcover illustrated edition. It begins and ends with endpaper photographs of some of the 264 Japanese wood and ivory carvings, gifted to Edmund de Waal by his great-uncle Iggie and the catalyst for de Waal’s inquiry into his own family history. Inside, we are introduced to the opulent mid-19th-century lifestyle of Parisian banker Charles Ephrussi, we learn of those tumultuous midwar years in Vienna, Hitler’s takeover of Austria and the horror of the Holocaust and its aftermath, then later the decision of great-uncle Iggie to move to Japan after World War Two. De Waal is a British ceramicist and art curator, and he applies strong scholarly principles to his research. But it is his emotional connection with the netsuke collection and the story of its survival that endear this book to so many.