17 Books Like The Caravaggio Conspiracy

I am a lover of the Plantagenet, Tudor, and Stuart decades of Britain. I enjoy reading about the history but also about the people who created that history. I didn't know anything about James VI and I except that he was Mary, Queen of Scots' only child and that he was the first monarch to hold the title in Scotland, Ireland, and England. I always he got short mention and was dismissed merely as a 'fool'. Which is why I was eager to read this book. It's a bit more than a biography -- it shows Scotland and England during his time, and what he had to govern. It was a much more violent and complicated time than I had ever expected. And my admiration for James increased dramatically as I learned of all the problems he had, both personal and with other countries as well as his own.
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In 1483, Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, were supposedly murdered in the Tower of London by their uncle, King Richard III. This is based on the fact that the boys were missing after Henry VII seized the English crown and Richard III died in battle.
Author Philippa Langley discovers letters, diaries and historical clues to the young boys' whereabouts and follows the information as a detective probing into a cold case of murder. It is a fascinating story, reading how and what evidence she uncovers, and then piecing together the centuries-old information. Her conclusion is that the young boys survived the Tower, were spirited away with Richard's help, and escaped to the continent.
I can't recommend this book enough if you like mysteries and history. This is a great combination of the two, and what's better -- it's real!

I didn't expect to like A Gentleman in Moscow nearly as much as I did. I'm not a gentleman. I don't really care about gentlemen, and I'm generally not all that sympathetic to the plight of the Russian aristocracy. Most of them had what they had because they were, in effect, slave owners.

Plus Rostov spent the book in a hotel. What could be less exciting--a prison without the normal drama and suffering of a prison? This book demonstrates what a great writer can do. To put the reader inside a world and a character, creating not just interest but wonder and even excitement built on a sympathy the reader might have never expected to feel. We're all human, after all. In the most important ways, we're all the same.

I see David Greaeber’s book as a landmark in the field. He completely changed my understanding of and views on money’s role in society and its evolution. I had the good fortune to meet David a few times (in fact, I made a podcast with him) and feel like I learned from every conversation.

Until I read David’s book, I had assumed that the Barter theory of money and the double coincidence of wants was the natural and unchallenged explanation for how money came to be and what roles it performed. David’s and subsequent authors' work has shown that this view is simplistic and outdated. 

History isn’t just “what happened.” Trillions of things happened. History is about the patterns to be found among those trillions of facts. Getting at such patterns means following deep themes, and what could be deeper than ideas? Watson explores when, where, how, and why significant ideas emerged in history, how ideas led to more ideas, to inventions, to cultural changes…we witness the emergence of a soul as a concept, we’re there to see Freud construct his tripartite model of the human psyche… Every idea is part of a thread and this book is woven of many threads. 

Yes, yes, history is an unbroken river of themes, but it’s also a chain of pivotal dramatic episodes. Dolnick gives us one such moment. In 17th century Europe, within two generations, a collection of brilliant oddballs invented science. They’re people, so they’re doing the sorts of things people do, elbowing and shoving one another to find the ultimate truth before the other guy. I appreciate that in the course of reading such a wonderfully enjoyable story, I somehow learn a great deal about the truth they were seeking, the underlying mathematical order of the universe in which they believed.

Culture is how we group ourselves. Culture is how we see. To make ourselves understood by people of other cultures, we have to lend them our eyes. That’s hard, but Yu Hua meets that challenge for me. His book China in Ten Words offers ten essays about China, each with a one-word title: Revolution. Reading. Copycat. Words like that. Each essay surrounds its title-word with content until one understands what the word means, not to oneself, but to Hua. The essays work like a fusion of memoir and history. They draw the reader into one man’s experience; and at the same time they illuminate a broad patch of history—Maoist and post-Maoist China.

If history is a story, the breaking news might be: Humans Dominate Planet. Why? Because of our superior brains, I’m told. But how do these brains work? Dr. Stephens explains it. He explains it like we’re on our way to get a beer, say, and he’s just telling me something he knows in his usual wisecracking way.  I’m chuckling, but his explanation is working, its putting pieces together, I think I see how we operate, how we humans are churning out this history we’re swimming in. 

This very well-researched and gripping book taught me the meaning of the term “laundering” in the art market and revealed the duplicity of the late art dealer, Larry Fleischman, who both collected and sold stolen antiquities and marketed undocumented works taken from Edward Hopper’s estate.

He didn’t care about provenance or history of ownership and is quoted in this book as saying: “Everything comes from somewhere.”

Although I knew and dealt with Fleishman, I trusted him and was tricked by him.

This is a pioneering, extraordinarily well-documented exposé of how famous museums have filled their shelves with looted artifacts and more than a few fakes – which, the author explains, tend to flock together. The author was a whistle-blowing curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He knows his stuff. So why was I reluctant to recommend this title?  Because it’s so hard to find and, with hundreds of photographs, costs upwards of $100. If you can find a used copy, grab it, and if your local library has it, kiss a librarian and make a donation.