The Best to Worst Books I Read in 2003
Looking for the best and worst historical books of 2003? From Norman Cantor’s *In the Wake of the Plague* to Paul Fussell’s *The Great War and Modern Memory*, I rank the history books I read that year—including the duds. See which titles on this curated list are essential reads and which to skip in this honest 2003 book review roundup.
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Black Death
by Philip Ziegler
Examines the origins of the Black Death and its spread across Europe in the 14th century. Also discusses its social and economic consequences and effects on the church.
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The Great War and Modern Memory
by Paul Fussell
The year 2000 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Great War and Modern Memory, winner of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and recently named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books. Fussell's landmark study of WWI remains as original and gripping today as ever before: a literate, literary, and illuminating account of the Great War, the one that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world. Exploring the work of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen, Fussell supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for those writers who most effectively memorialized WWI as an historical experience with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning. For this special edition, the author has prepared a new afterword and a suggested further reading list. As this classic work draws upon several disciplines--among them literary studies, military history, cultural criticism, and historical inquiry--it will continue to appeal to students, scholars, and general readers of various backgrounds.
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Mummies, Myth and Magic in Ancient Egypt
by Christine El Mahdy
How the practice of mummification arose, how it was perfected and how it came to play a central part in the ancient Egyptian quest for eternal life.
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In the Wake of the Plague
by Norman F. Cantor
The Black Death was the fourteenth century's equivalent of a nuclear war. It wiped out one-third of Europe's population, takingmillion lives. And yet, most of what we know about it is wrong. The details of the Plague etched in the minds of terrified schoolchildren -- the hideous black welts, the high fever, and the awful end by respiratory failure -- are more or less accurate. But what the Plague really was and how it made history remain shrouded in a haze of myths. Now, Norman Cantor, the premier historian of the Middle Ages, draws together the most recent scientific discoveries and groundbreaking historical research to pierce the mist and tell the story of the Black Death as a gripping, intimate narrative.