Page Turners
Travel back in time with five exhilarating books by today’s must-read history writers
History is one of my favorite subjects. I particularly love historical non-fiction narrative. With this list, I’ve gathered five of my favorite books in this subgenre that I’ve either already read or am in the process of finishing.
From debunking the myth of the Amazon woman and bringing to light the true history of her culture, which is far more interesting than any tall tale, to understanding the true factors behind cult leader Charles Manson’s mental deterioration, and how he managed to convince several of his followers to become cold-blooded killers, these books cover a wide berth, from ancient history to modern America.
Check out these five page turners, and let me know your own recommendations in the comment section below!
The Amazons
“King Iasos wanted only sons. He left his infant daughter to die on a mountainside in Arcadia, the rugged highlands of southern Greece. A mother bear nursed the abandoned baby. Hunters found the feral girl and named her Atalanta. Like a female Tarzan, Atalanta was a natural athlete and hunter. Self-reliant, with a “fiery, masculine gaze,” she wrestled like a bear and could outrun any animal or man. Atalanta loved wrestling and she was strong enough to defeat the hero Peleus in a grappling contest. This bold tomboy of Greek myth was happiest roaming alone in the forest with her bow and spear. Life in the wilderness held dangers. But when a pair of malicious Centaurs tried to rape Atalanta, she killed them with her arrows.
Because of her bravery and prowess, Atalanta was the only woman invited to join the mythic expedition to destroy the terrible Calydonian Boar.”
The prologue of The Amazons by Adrienne Mayor opens with a thrilling tale of ancient mythology. Soon though, readers are taken on an exciting journey as Mayor separates fact and fiction, thus creating an accurate image of ancient history’s real-life “Amazons” for the first time. While many are introduced to the Amazonian archetype by way of the comic book character Wonder Woman, this fascinating book gets to the truth of the famous character by thrusting us into the world of ancient Scythia, the Amazons’ homeland, their nomadic tendencies which make for memorable tales, and archeological digs that shine a light on history’s long-lost women warriors.
Part adventurous legend, part scientific journey, The Amazons dispels many myths associated with the mysterious culture, whose wide-spread tribes stretched from islands outside of Ancient Greece, along the Black Sea, throughout the Caucasus Mountains, and into Asia.
The author also takes us into the world of Ancient Greek art and shows us just how much the culture loved depicting Amazon women doing fierce battle with Greece’s most decorated warriors. At one point, Mayer writes, “After Heracles, Amazons were the single most popular subjects in Greek vase paintings.”
Mayor brilliantly distinguishes between fact and fiction, allowing the reader to understand and appreciate the various “Amazon” cultures for both their actual history, and the impressive effects this history had on other cultures who drew a strong gender divide no man or woman could cross:
“For the Greeks, tantalizing scraps of information and legends about women of Scythia—especially the ideas of “rogue” groups of female roughriders roaming on their own without men—inspired countless “what if” scenarios. A mythic “alternative world” of Amazons was created from pieces of evidence about the real-world Scythians, who posed a theoretical question of vital interest to a male-centered warrior society like Greece.”
So, did the strong-willed Scythian women of ancient times really cut off one breast for better bow and arrow handling? Were they really a tribe exclusively made up of women? Did they really kill any boy born to them?
The answers to these questions will not only surprise you, but they’ll also leave you pleasantly enlightened.
The Amazons by Adrienne Mayor is a great read for those who love ancient history, women’s history, mythology, and anthropology
Nothing Less Than Victory
“For these kings, each act of expansion was an expression of legitimacy that strengthened his connections to his ancestors, bolstered the support of the nobility beneath him, affirmed his personal magnificence, and gave his subjects a goal as well as a means to promotion by gaining favor in the king’s eyes. All of this suggests that the decision to attack the Greeks was motivated not primarily by strategic concerns—calculations of elative power, for instance, or the need for material resources or taxes—but rather by the ideology of magnificent dominance, and that this ideology, not strategy, would dictate the size, organization, and use of military forces. Such motivations would only be strengthened, should a desire for revenge enter the king’s mind. To use purely strategic criteria to understand these events is fundamentally flawed.”
The late, great political scientist and historian John David Lewis presents history’s most epic battles with striking clarity in his classic book, Nothing Less Than Victory. His depictions of battles, from Ancient Greece to Imperial Japan, are eye-opening. Even more eye-opening is his commentary on each individual battle or war, which makes note of two things.
First, the different battles he covers were won by the victorious party because of an overbearing offensive strike. The second is that through philosophy he shows that contrary to popular belief, it isn’t land or resource expansion that fueled many of history’s wars, but ideology itself. The point he drives home is that if a war is to be won, the ideology that started it in the first place needs to be completely dismantled as well.
In the book he states, “…the deeply rooted Persian ideology of expanding royal supremacy was on a collision course with these budding Greek ideals of self-governance, autonomy, and intellectual inquiry.”
If the standard military history book leaves you feeling a bit underwhelmed due to long passages on the physical concretes of war, like weaponry, strategy, and location, this may be a great book to try out. While battles do play a sizeable part in the book due to its subject matter, Lewis also immerses the reader in the cultures involved and the philosophies that drove them to war, and victory.
Nothing Less Than Victory is a great book for lovers of military history, ancient history, world history, and philosophy
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
“After the murders, the media blamed Hollywood’s “unreality and hedonism,” as the New York Times’s Stephen Roberts put it, for having fostered an atmosphere where mass homicide was all but guaranteed. Roberts, then Los Angeles bureau chief of the Times, talked to a lot of Hollywood people in those first weeks. Bugliosi quoted him in [his book] Helter Skelter. “All the stories had a common thread: That somehow the victims had brought the murders on themselves…The attitude was summed up in the epigram: ‘Live freaky, die freaky.’”
“The problem was, thirty years later, no one could agree on who had brought the “freakiness” into the home, and why. I had to wonder if there was a conspiracy of silence in Hollywood. It had taken months for the LAPD to crack the case. In that time, Manson and the Family had almost certainly killed others. If Hollywood hadn’t circled the wagons, it seemed there was a good chance the investigation could have ended sooner. So many of the people I spoke to had strong ideas about why these murders had happened—and yet none of them had spoken to the police, and many remained unwilling to go on the record with me.
The one thing everyone seemed to agree on—everyone outside of the DA’s office, that is—is that Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter motive didn’t add up.”
My mother recommended Tom O’Neill’s Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret history of the Sixties to me and let me borrow her copy. The main title of this piece is simply “Page Turners,” and this book fits that term to the fullest.
O’Neill was tasked with covering the infamous Charles Manson murders decades after the killing spree happened. Manson’s cult followers left eight known victims dead over a two-day span in Hollywood, including the famous actress, Sharon Tate, and the eight and a half month old baby she was pregnant with at the time. While he feared that too much time had passed to uncover anything new, once he got underway with his assignment, nothing could have been further from the truth.
O’Neill started his investigation for what he thought would be a simple commemorative article. He contacted Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor during the Manson trial, and the attorney became a friendly alliance as O’Neill gathered information. But once he dug too deep, Bugliosi became a bitter rival.
This true crime read turns the case of Manson and his “Family” on its head, and uses copious amounts of freshly uncovered evidence to make the case that the FBI influenced Manson and others via covert CIA projects like Operation CHAOS and MKUltra.
I will offer a disclaimer. O’Neill is a fabulous writer. Without trying to reduce the gravity of these horrific events, I will say you feel like you’re reading a fast-paced crime novel most of the time. In my opinion, the opening scene, which describes the Sharon Tate murder that left four others dead as well, should be read during the daytime. I made the mistake of starting the book around 11PM on a weeknight in the midst of a hellacious thunderstorm. I didn’t get much sleep that night. But once I revisited the book after a bit of cooling time, I couldn’t put it down.
Chaos is a good read for true crime enthusiasts, American history buffs, crime-mystery readers, and those interested in the dark history of Hollywood (and the CIA)
Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy
“As many as four hundred women, in both North and South, were posing and fighting as men. Some joined the army with a brother, father, sweetheart, or husband; one couple even enlisted together on their honeymoon. Some, like a twelve-year-old girl who joined as a drummer boy, were fleeing an abusive home situation. For poor, working-class, and farm women, the bounties and pay ($13 per month for Union soldiers, $11 for Confederates) served as an incentive.”
Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy is a book club book my sister and I picked out while browsing bookstore shelves one day. It’s a Civil War story that reads more like an adventure novel than historical nonfiction. It follows the real-life accounts of four women who helped both sides of the war. The teenaged Belle Boyd was “an avowed rebel with a dangerous temper.” She became a spy for the Confederate army. Rose O’Neal Greenhow was much more understated than Rose, but was no less successful in gathering information that helped the Southern cause. Elizabeth Van Lew was an abolitionist, and created an “espionage ring” for the Union army so effective she even successfully placed spies behind enemy lines in the most intimate of rebel settings.
The character that truly took my heart in this book is the fourth woman author Karen Abbott introduces early on, Emma Edmonds. A devout abolitionist as well due to her Christian faith, she was one of those brave women determined to escape an abusive homelife. Knowing the Union army would never let women fight on the frontlines of battle, she disguised herself as a man, took on the name Frank Thompson, and joined the fight. She experienced the horrors of the frontlines, dodging musket fire as she tended to the wounded. She rode horseback with vital messages to different camps that helped the Union hold off the rebels or send them retreating. She even went through the agonizing pain of falling in love with one of her fellow soldiers, knowing that revealing her true identity would only cause confusion and distrust. She stands as the moral beacon of the book, and the fact that she really existed shows just how much strength, beauty, and determination humans are capable of holding.
Only recently has women’s history truly been revealed for study. Authors like Abbott, or Dr. Daisy Dunn, who wrote The Missing Thread (another great read that really deserves its own article) are unearthing a plethora of evidence that shows the notion that women were on the sidelines for most of history is demonstrably false. They fought alongside men. They trained alongside men. They were fierce warriors and lovers, like men. Uncovering stories like Emma Edmonds’ show that today’s women, like rugby player and Olympic medalist Ilona Maher or boxer Amanda Serrano, aren’t taking part in a new phenomenon of female-oriented physical prowess and strength of character, they are continuing a rich, storied legacy that was never really phenomena at all.
Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy was recommended by the great history writer, Erik Larson, who’s authored many books that have become some of my favorites (thanks goes to my mom, who lets me borrow her copies). Abbott’s objectivity in presenting both sides of the war, coupled with her fast-paced, illuminating storytelling, makes this book a true page-turner.
Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy is a great book for Civil War buffs, American history buffs, Women’s history enthusiasts, and those who have a particular interest in the early days of espionage.
The Cave and the Light
“Every Hellenistic philosopher insisted that life was about the soul’s search for the one crucial thing it did hot have but which, once it was found, would make it happy. But what was that one thing? That’s where the battle began.”
Arthur Herman and his book, The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization, does something remarkable. Through each story told, anecdote related, and fact presented, he makes Raphael’s famous “School of Athens” painting, featuring Ancient Greece’s most prominent philosophers, come to life. Page after page, the world of Ancient Greek philosophers, both well-known and marginal, paints such a vivid picture you feel like you’re walking through the streets of Athens attending lectures, or meeting your fellow citizens on the steps of the stoa for lively conversation.
“The death of Archimedes and the fall of Syracuse also marked the end of an independent Hellenistic world. A new power now ruled the Mediterranean: Rome.”
Herman not only covers Ancient Greece’s prevailing philosophies, from Platonism and Aristotelianism to Stoicism and Epicureanism, he also segues into Rome to show just how much influence the Ancient Greeks had on the Roman culture as they built their own civilization.
But he doesn’t stop there.
“Aristotle had shown how the Roman republic could save itself, or so it seemed to Cicero. Cicero had worked out the means to do it. His ideal commonwealth built on the free association of citizens inspired by great men to do great deeds would be rediscovered with delight by the buoyant age of the Renaissance and be passed along down to America’s founders.”
With each new page, Herman shows that the Ancient Greeks, perhaps more than any other civilization, influenced even our most modern societies’ fledgling days, like early America.
It’s a bold statement to make, but Herman’s The Cave and the Light could substitute for an ancient history class taught at some of the world’s finest institutions. It’s a book you’ll revisit over and over, and each time you’ll learn new material and draw new, enlightening conclusions. It’s a classic, and one of my personal favorite philosophy and history books I’ve ever read.
The Cave and the Light is a great book for serious students of history, philosophy lovers, American history lovers (the Founding Fathers were big on the Ancient Greeks), and studiers of Western civilization, from ancient to modern.
Stoicism is actually making a bit of a comeback. It's been a part of cognitive-behavioral therapy for a while. Yes, you actually can stop being triggered if you want to be...
I think the Amazon's popular with men because it's a woman who likes guy stuff--look at the immense popularity of 'gamer girls'. And...maybe a femdom fantasy too.
Ironically in the modern era with most status achievements now not being tied to physical strength you can have much more realistic Amazons--a successful female entrepreneur or Nobel laureate is, effectively an 'amazon' in having excelled in a traditionally-male field.
Thanks for these! I've had my eye on Chaos, but I will now add "Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy" to my list as well.