Books like The Venetian Empire — picked by fans

Written forty years ago at the dawn of the personal computer age and well before the internet and the rise of social media, Postman’s book is a gripping read, a 20th-century warning for 21st-century readers about the dark consequences of the replacement of print media by visual forms of entertainment masquerading as information, a transformation that has had a devastating impact upon the ability of a citizenry to make informed decisions. 

In his relatively brief account, Postman described the way in which visual media overshadowed print in the 20th century. In that process, the “information” transmitted on a flickering screen became shaped by the need for brevity and, above all, the values of entertainment designed to “sell” products that cater to the emotional needs of the paying audience. While the printed words could be read and re-read for a more complex understanding of deeper meanings, electronic images were fleeting and,… show more.

I love this book because it changed the way I look at the world. It was a game changer when it was first written in French in 1949 and remains essential reading for anyone interested in European History.

Braudel offers a panoramic view of Europe’s diverse civilizations and how they were shaped by the continent’s environment and geography. Centred on the Mediterranean Braudel ranges across time and space and explores the interaction, exchange and conflict between people who lived on the sea, in the mountains and on the plain.

It remains a classic because Braudel was a rare thing among historians – he was a great writer.

We are reminded on almost a daily basis of the plight of refugees in fragile boats that this sea can be cruel as well as kind. The present diaspora has its forerunners – in this book the great population exchange of 1923 that saw the displacement of two million people across the Mediterranean: Greeks living in the Ottoman Empire, Turks living in Greece. Bruce Clarke both explains the chain of events in the aftermath of the First World War and records the personal stories of those who were uprooted from the places they called home. They have a familiar resonance, the repeating patterns of memory and loss: ‘I remember the day they went away,’ recorded a Greek woman of her Muslim neighbours. ‘Some kissed the earth, some took bowls of soil with them. They were decent types; their menfolk used to attend our funerals, and we would exchange presents of… show more.

When life gets a little too much I’d recommend a visit to Corfu in the 1930s with Lawrence Durrell. It’s a diary, semi-fictionalised, of a year living on the island, both a history and a personal evocation of one corner of the Mediterranean world – Corfu’s people, landscape, and history, woven through Durrell’s island idyll beside the most enchanting sea. Durrell hunts fish at night by lamplight, discusses philosophy in taverns, records the timeless cycles of island life – olive harvesting, grape gathering, village festivals, puppet shows, folklore, and superstitions –and sits by candlelight watching the moon rise over the sea, the night air ‘cool as a breath from the heart of a melon’. It’s bitter sweet.

Logue’s modernist reworking of the Iliad – the Trojan war - mother of all Mediterranean contests, is quite unlike anything you’ll ever read. Logue doesn’t translate, he remakes. It’s as cinematic as a film script, cast in a poetic language as brilliant as anything in modern times, full of jump cuts, staccato effects, and startling contemporary references. The violence of the fighting has a slamming immediacy (‘Dust like red mist/Pain like chalk on slate’), the Mediterranean – ‘the sea that is always counting’ - glimmers and sighs, the Gods behave like spoiled children, helicopters go whumping over the dunes.

This book opened my eyes to the often cataclysmic consequences of European exploration and colonization of islands and continents beyond itself, a shockwave of transformations and extinctions that have impoverished the human and biological diversity of the Earth continuing to the present.

Crosby—a pioneer of environmental history—often writes with wry humor about a very serious topic. His chapter on the invasion of the eastern Atlantic islands and its aftermath ("The Fortunate Isles") is especially good. 

Like so much else Mumford wrote, this book is a volcano of provocative ideas that I found revelatory when I first read it and still do. Published in 1970, it summarizes much of Mumford’s thinking about the largely invisible and growing power structure he calls the Megamachine that threatens humanity and life on planet Earth.

His earlier writing, including The City in History (1961) and his essay The Natural History of Urbanization (1956), was formative for my own thinking about urban parasitism and aggression. Although a lover of cities, as am I, Mumford was well aware of the consequences of their depredations. 

I originally intended to write a chapter in my book about how the birth of San Francisco (and other imperial cities) sent out a shock wave of deforestation, but I only touched lightly upon it in my chapter on mining.

Greg King has filled that need in his magisterial book about how ruthlessly and quickly the city’s magnates converted one of the Earth’s most magnificent forests and remarkable ecosystems into stumps as well as cash, credit, and dynastic fortunes on the city’s markets so that today only four percent of California’s old-growth redwoods remain.

Depressing as his narrative might otherwise be, King also reveals how the epic fight to save what remains has—like the campaign to stop whaling—changed popular perceptions of our living colleagues so that what once seemed a heroic enterprise now appears to many an epic crime. 

Nearly every line of this memoir stopped me in my tracks.

I read most of it at a local café, teacup in hand, blinking back tears more times than I care to admit. Gilbert's precision and beauty on the page are simply breathtaking. She doesn't describe the world so much as conjure it, and she pulled me in until her cobbled Roman streets and dusty Indian pathways felt like my own. I tasted that whole pizza with her, felt the sun’s warmth on her shoulders, and ached through each layered heartbreak as though it were mine.

She doesn't merely tell her story. She throws open the door to her innermost self and refuses to let you look away. I wept. I laughed. And when the last page came, I sat quietly for a long moment, reluctant to leave her and her world behind.

Sicily is part of my family’s heritage, and back when they emigrated to America, they left a lot of their language and culture behind or didn’t pass it down to the next generation.

Seeking Sicily fills in some of those blanks in my family’s cultural history. It does what I haven’t been able to do, roam around the island meeting many different people and asking about everything from food to religious rituals to life amid the ruins of old palaces and ancient monuments.

It’s a really intimate book that still gives a great overview of Sicilian life.