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Maybe someday
45
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
45/100Critics
44/100Scholars
Author:
Richard Cohen
Publisher:
Simon & Schuster
Date:
April 19, 2022
Richard Cohen explores how professional historians and other equally significant witnessesâsuch as the writers of the Bible, novelists and political propagandistsâinfluence what becomes the accepted record. Making History investigates the published works and private utterances of our greatest chroniclers to discover the agendas that informed theirâand ourâviews of the world.
What The Reviewers Say
... an enthralling investigation into the ways in which the background of historians affected and affects the way they present the past. Using such lively material as autobiographies (for which historians have had a predictable fondness), letters and the comments of contemporaries, he brings to life Herodotus, Tacitus, Muhammad, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Gibbon, Marx and Churchill as well as the modern tele-historians Mary Beard and Simon Schama. Black history and 'herstory', novelists and journalists, Bible stories and military campaigns, Putin’s revision of Russian history: all pass under his consistently entertaining scrutiny. There are memorable anecdotes galore.
Sprawling and wildly ambitious, idiosyncratic and also consistently readable and engaging, Making History dives deep into the way history-driven scholars and artists — from Burns to Shakespeare to Herodotus — have shaped the collective memory of humankind. Championing both famous and largely forgotten historians as well as storytellers, filmmakers and photographers, Cohen’s volume offers memorable anecdotes and reasoned judgment as it explores themes including the foundational mythos of the Old and New Testaments.
Cohen is English, and was the director of two London publishing houses, biographical facts that, to apply his own test, might account for (a) his willingness to treat journalism, historical fiction, and television documentaries on a par with the work of professional scholars, since, as a publisher, he is interested in work that has an audience and an influence, and (b) the Anglocentrism of his choices.
... a substantial, ambitious and consistently readable inquiry into the history of history.
