CAPC Members discussion

Man, guys, just finished The Warmth of Other Suns. Definitely has its flaws, but it's a really beautiful book. Highly recommended. There were a lot of elements of Jim Crow that it described in ways I never understood before. I'm curious, what history books have radically changed your understanding of the world, in a way that you wouldn't have expected?

It's not distance history (I read it a mere decade after the events described), but Joe Sacco's Palestine describes through interviews with Palestinians the Intifada from a Palestinian vantage. It gave me a whole new perspective on the people in Palestine just as my paradigm shifted enough to allow for that kind of thing. It was a breathtaking horrorshow and I found it both affecting and shaming.

Another decade later, Sacco would write a second book about Israel and Palestine and events in 1953 called Footnotes In Gaza that would have accomplished the same for me had I not already experienced the change.

Both are excellent, highly subjective works (as they rely on oral histories), but their main power is in allowing readers to see through new eyes.

I have been trying to think of an equivalent. Mark Noll's the civil war as theological crisis is the best equivalent I can think of. It really made me reconsider my evangelical history around the civil war and remember that not every own is on the side of the Angels.

Another very important book is steve Jobs bio. Other have done a similar thing. But the Jobs bio was the best at illustrating that people that have great impacts on history are not necessarily great people.

King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild affected me much the same way as Warmth. It is haunting and you cannot put it down.