Playing God by Charles L. Mee Jr.My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Combined with the title, the subtitle "Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World" makes this seem like a total buy-in to the Great man theory. However, it as much undercuts that as supports it.
Each and all of these figure among the contingencies that operate in the production of historical events, and yet they do not form a complete set of causes. Even if we were to identify all the classes of cause of historical events, we could not construct a complete causal explanation of any given moment. Because each cause has a previous cause, if we were to attempt to explain the complete causes of events, we should soon become trapped in an infinite regression of explanation
An accomplished author of several noteworthy histories, I really enjoyed the context and flavor added to significant events, such as:
* The nature of accomodations Pope Leo would have used enroute to his confrontation with Attila the Hun outside Rome
* The symbolic pageantry and theater of Henry VIII and Francis I's meeting on the Field of the Cloth of Gold where even costume accessories spelled out messages to the initiated
* The complexities of religion and smallpox behind the tragic meeting between Cortes and Moctezuma
* The ailing Woodrow Wilson with Clemenceau and Lloyd George at the Paris Peace Conference
Basically chronological, this brings us to the unintended consequences of Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt's gathering at Yalta and Gorbachev desperate at the G7 nations in London. For the last half of the Twentieth Century, there is so much about those events relevant to today, that Mee can't abstract out circumstance and flavor and this detailed reportage starts then to read more like a textbook. Another thing keeping me from saying four stars is the poort audiobook production: an unimpressive narrator and audio quality that makes me think it the microphone was across the room... in the parka pocket of a man eating potato chips.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment