I think the most helpful view of a historical period comes from reading both original sources, such as diaries, contemporaneous journalism, or memoirs of participants, and a selection of recent scholarship.
The immediate sources give an impression of what it was like to live through the events. The recent publications include information that was unavailable to individual participants and can provide an overview of the events as a whole.
I wrote: “I would better read all my journals, than some other writer, who most undoubtably placed ‘their own slant on it’, thereby ruining the soup.”
Taxchick wrote in response:
“I think the most helpful view of a historical period comes from reading both original sources, such as diaries, contemporaneous journalism, or memoirs of participants, and a selection of recent scholarship.
The immediate sources give an impression of what it was like to live through the events. The recent publications include information that was unavailable to individual participants and can provide an overview of the events as a whole.”
My summation:
1. In the writer’s voice that Taxchick employed, it is evident that her either period of birth, was well after The Fall of The Berlin Wall, or she has been indoctrinated so, to believe that the writings of one Miss Anne Frank are an editor’s correction of the period of events, as seen through post-war eyes.
2. To state that individual first-hand journaled experiences are, weak at best, without impartial post-event histories included, is assenine.
3. Methinks she has been to the ivory tower of academia once too often, and not stopped by her parents.
Totally missing is historical education and perspective about one of the most explosively expensive (ruinous) and pervasive issues of the last 40 years: climate change.
I would add at least these three:
Global Crisis, Geoffrey Parker [LF]
The Third Horseman, William Rosen[LF]
The Dust Bowl, Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns [LF]
Most of the books in my digital library are read on an Amazon (small) Paper White Kindle. (NO COLOR)
I also have the FREE Kindle for the PC "app" and Kindle for iPAD 2 which are both recommended for reading any title I display as [LF] above, which have large color maps and other illustrations or material which cannot really be displayed usefully on a monochrome or grayscale small display.