John Lewis Gaddis' The Landscape of History: Part 2

As promised, here is the review of John Lewis Gaddis' The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. Gaddis' work is on historiography, and so fair warning to those who are looking for a brief pleasure read on how historians do what they do: this is the nuts and bolts of historical work. It is not for the faint of heart.

That being said, Gaddis makes the book entertaining, lacing it with gentle humor and references to other subjects, including literature (the first chapter contains a running metaphor to Virginia Woolf's first novel Orlando, and a later chapter contains a quote from Tolstoy's seminal work War and Peace, not to mention the blink-and-you'll-miss-it Douglas Adams reference - all of which make the English major in me very happy) and paleontology. The writing style is fluid and casual, a professor chatting with a student about the hows and whys of the craft. Because it is a series of lectures that have been taken and turned into essays, Gaddis is able to preserve the conversational tone, and it works very well with the topics that he addresses, preventing them from becoming completely and utterly boring (which, in the hands of another author, could have been the case).

Gaddis does spend quite a bit of time (from about the fourth chapter onwards) mocking the social sciences in a not-so-gentle manner that does not quite fit with his tone in the rest of the essays. He also throws in a few quips against theories that he does not agree with which, if you are not familiar with them (and I'm not - but I'm sure I will become quite familiar with them in the future), you are likely to miss or simply pass over.

Overall, I enjoyed The Landscape of History, but I am glad that I was reading it for class, and not on my own, as pleasure reading. Having the class discussion and writing assignments to structure my reading definitely helped with understanding what to look for in Gaddis' text, which, while conversational, could be difficult to follow at times.

Now on to the next book on my reading list - ironically enough, Orlando.