a tiny rant about history books

[edenfalling]

Things to keep in mind if you are ever writing historical nonfiction:

1. A history book is not the place to grind axes about current political or cultural issues. I don't care how relevant you think they are. You sold your book as history, not as contemporary trend analysis. Every word you spend blathering on about whatever bugs have crawled up your ass is one fewer word spent on what I opened your book to learn, and consequently a wasted moment of my life I can never retrieve.

2. If you treat every historical person who crosses your page with sneering disdain, put down your pen until you find a sense of charity toward human fallibility, the ability to imagine motives other than the glibly villainous, and some goddamn perspective. I don't care how witty or morally superior you think you are. You sold your book as history, not as the bastard lovechild of a Hollywood gossip site and a cranky tabloid newspaper op-ed.

...

This brought to you by one of the three library books I acquired yesterday by way of background research for my Yuletide fic. The other two are fine, and I have hopes of two more I put hold requests on, but this one makes me want to magically reach through time and space and shake the writer until he revises his manuscript from the ground up.

(And now I am going to bed, because I am coming down with what promises to be a nasty cold and I'd like to sleep through as much of it as possible. Bleh.)

Comments

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

I hate it when history books either A) put up history and historic people as a grand morality play (which we ingrain into children from a young age anyway, what with all our "Washington and his cherry tree" stories and "Lincoln had a funny hat" and "Helen Keller was a poor blind and deaf girl but then could communicate- and never did anything else her whole life") where people are either heroes or villains OR B) get mad that at the historic people that they aren't heroes and instead have failings.

Luckily, I think I'll manage to avoid most of that during this year's yuletide research...

[akatsuki210.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, what historical period are you researching?

[edenfalling]

Yeah, hagiographies and hatchet jobs are equally annoying to read -- people are multi-faceted and always have been, in every era.

Good luck with your own Yuletide research!

[edenfalling]

Hmm, how much information would count as a spoiler...?

Okay, to be broad: one or more parts of Europe, in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. A very tumultuous period, with lots of colorful personalities, and one whose interpretations people still argue over hundreds of years later. :-)