A few more books of note (good not great)

I had to add a handful of books that didn’t really make my best-of list for many different reasons, but were worthy of note anyway.

On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, coming up on 150 years old this fall, was notable for what it was not; it was not what we would call today an argument from science and data. Rather it was an argument from logic, not surprising given Darwin’s ecclesiastical education, but also not different in form from the intelligent design tracts of his day, or our day.

The Art of Eating, the Collected Gastronomical Works of MFK Fisher. These essays go back to the days of the depression and WWII when getting, keeping and preserving food was an art. No running to the supermarket for just the right ingredients. If you didn’t have it, you didn’t eat it. And if you had it, you ate every part of it in every conceivable way. Today, scrimping means buying the store brand of a prepared meal; in Fisher’s day, it meant finding a creative recipe for chicken feet. And loving it.

A Life of Johnson, by James Boswell. If Boswell were alive today, he would be blogging. I had expected this book to be somehow weightier and more scholarly. It’s chatty, roughly linear, occasionally insightful, but except for a cursory summary of Johnson’s childhood, really only reports the parts of Johnson’s life that Boswell himself witnessed. It’s a diary, not a biography as we have come to understand that form.

Eleanor of Aquitaine, by Alison Weir. Wife of two kings, mother of three, and by far the richest woman in 12th Century Europe, Eleanor of Aquitaine presided over an empire stretching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. When she was born, Europe was a collection of ruling families who bought, sold, traded or conquered territories and people like today’s corporate raiders. By her death in 1216, the modern European nation state was struggling to be born.

It was the time of the troubadours and courtly love, the crusades and the beginning of modern music. It was also a time of unspeakable violence and brutality where no man, woman or child, peasant or queen, was safe from the worst horrors humans could inflict on one another. (The Inquisition took official form 17 years after her death.)

This book will disabuse you of any Disney-esque notions you might still have about Eleanor’s favorite son, Richard the Lionheart (known in his own time and in his native language, Langue d’oc, as Richard oc et non – Richard yes and no -- because he never went back on his word.) Eleanor, Richard, his brother John (of Magna Carta fame) and probably her husband King Henry II (he who struggled with Thomas a’ Beckett) all spoke Langue d’oc. But less than 30 years after her death, Langue d’oc was stamped out by a resurgent France that dismembered Eleanor and Henry’s empire and launched the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1244). That's why they speak French in France today.

Why wasn’t this on my best-books list? The book was good, not great. The story was great. Altogether, one of the most eventful 100 years in modern times, and in fact it was the beginning of the modern world as we know it. You already know many of Eleanor's contemporaries: Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Saladin. Mamonaides was re-introducing Europe to the works of Aristotle, which some date as the start of the Renaissance. In another part of the world, Genghis Khan was performing his predations. But that’s a different story.