What might have happened recently to make historians—or at least publishers—more interested in how diseases have affected the course of human existence? Last year saw many fine histories, including the magisterial Plagues Upon the Earth by Kyle Harper. One of the best history books of this year was James Belich’s The World the Plague Made, which concentrates on the Black Death of the 14th century and its surprising role in turning Europe into the centre of the world.
Andrew Doig’s This Mortal Coil is, according to its own subtitle, a history of death. One of its four main sections is devoted to diseases, but it also covers food (and its absence), genetic inheritances and various forms of self-harm in its survey of how humankind has popped its clogs over the centuries. Much of the text is morbidly fascinating—like a grownup version of the Horrible Histories books—but Doig never loses sight of the seriousness of his subject, as he catapults it—and us—into questions of science and the future.
France: An Adventure History, by Graham Robb, is full of life. It is a complete history of France from Caesar’s time to now; although rather than just being one thing after another, it is one thing that interests Robb after another, including the implications of the Dreyfus affair and the meaning of the Tour de France. Thanks to the way Robb does his research—often literally getting on his own bike to sniff things out—it is très facile to go along with him.
Jessie Childs’s The Siege of Loyalty House and Edward Wilson-Lee’s A History of Water are both compelling stories that cast new light on their subjects. The former makes a single house, raided several times across a few years, stand for the whole of England’s civil war. The latter is not what its title suggests but, rather, an amazingly intricate account of Portugal’s Golden Age, constructed around two explorers and their competing visions for an expanding world.
Indigenous Continent, by the Oxford-based Finnish historian Pekka Hämäläinen, looks at the US from a distance—and sees something that others have neglected. There are numerous other books about Native American history, but few that have made it so central to the American story as a whole. Here, the indigenous people aren’t just the objects of nonindigenous violence.
If Hämäläinen’s book makes you wonder at how history becomes history—the shared story we have of the past—Richard Cohen’s Making History will fuel your thoughts. For the most part it is a lively analysis-cum-celebration of the storytellers, from Herodotus to Mary Beard, who have used their talents to bring us their version of events, though Cohen doesn’t shy away from the problem of which versions of events have tended to dominate: those of the powerful, the white and the male.
In its way, Karina Urbach’s Alice’s Book is a demonstration of—and corrective to—the same problem. The Alice of the title is Urbach’s own grandmother, a Jewish chef who published a popular cookbook in 1930s Austria. It was so popular that it continued to be published under the Nazis, long after Alice had fled to Britain, except her name was excised and a new author, Rudolf Rösch, conjured up to replace it. Eighty years later, this new book is an important act of reclamation.
Anthony Beevor’s books are always meticulously researched and sympathetic to the horrors of their subjects—qualities that feel particularly important in the case of his Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1921, a conflict that may have resulted in some 10m deaths. It forms an enlightening partnership with Helen Rappaport’s After the Romanovs, which tells the story of those Russians who fled the Bolsheviks and wound up in Paris.
But, of course, not all history is human history. Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday, casts its readers further and further back, past the mammoths, past the dinosaurs, back to an alien world of shifting rock and weird plants. It is a marvel.
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Books of the Year 2022: Lives
Books of the Year 2022: Politics & Reportage
Books of the Year 2022: Ideas
