We are in August, the holiday month par excellence, a month to travel and move around. This year perhaps less than normal, due to the restrictions that we are still suffering, nationally and internationally, due to the covid-19 pandemic. But what can make us travel more than a good book? Today, in XX Centuries, I propose a journey through time and space through various historical essays that manage to transfer readers to specific places and moments in the past. Will you accompany me on this journey?
Our journey begins in Ancient Egypt, where the Egyptologist Salima Ikram takes us with her Ancient Egypt. Introduction to its history and culture (translation by Ignacio Alonso Blanco Nun, Almuzara), a good work to get started in that culture and travel along the Nile several millennia ago. We cross the Mediterranean to the north and go to democratic Athens led by Professor Laura Sancho, author of The birth of democracy (Attic of the Books,), a review of that two-century experiment that represented Athenian democracy in the Attica of Antiquity.
We continue along the Mare Nostrum, this time to the west, until we see the protrusion of Mount Vesuvius. There the author Daisy Dunn, through Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger, proposes a journey through the Roman world of the 1st century AD. C. in Under the shadow of vesuvius (translation by Victoria León, Siruela, 2021).
Fast forward to medieval France where Eric Jagger, author of The last duel, (translation by Joan Eloi Roca, Attic of the Books) is capable of making us feel and live the life of little nobles of the late Middle Ages, of getting us into medieval judgment and leading us to a fair to death in the heart of Paris. It is so vivid that in a few months we will see its adaptation to the cinema.
Let us leave Europe and march to the East, towards the confines of Asia. Let’s go into that paradise dreamed of by Europeans, the famous Spice Islands, where, for a time, Spanish was spoken. In the archipelago of the Spices (Desperta Ferro), a group of international specialists review the relationship between Spain and the Moluccas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in a large-format and beautifully crafted book that opens the doors to a certainly unknown place and part of our history. .
We’re not going too far, just a little further north, to China. In The great state. China and the world, by Timothy Brook (translation by Belén Cuadra Mora, Alianza) takes a look at the Asian giant, its history and its relationship with the outside world for eight centuries through a series of characters and stories that immerse us in Chinese culture and they make you look at it differently.
A little further west is another giant, India, which is our next stop. In Anarchy (Javier Romero’s translation), by William Dalrymple, takes us to 18th century India and tells the terrible and vivid story of how a private company, The East India Company, took a great country under its control and gave it up. fleeced.
We return to Europe, this time to Spain and to a dramatic moment. In War and knife (Sphere of the Books), the young historian Daniel Aquillué recalls the sites of Zaragoza (1808-1809) in a narratively attractive way, but that does not remove a hint of horror and realism from that brutal resistance in the middle of the War of Independence.
We leave our country momentarily, then we will return, to go further north, again to Paris. Let us tour the Paris Commune led by the journalist Propser-Olivier Lissagaray, a member and participant of that Commune. He managed to survive and flee to London where he wrote this History of the Paris Commune of 1871 (translation by Blanca Gago Domínguez, Captain Swing) where he narrates the triumph, splendor, fall and repression of the Commune.
Let us follow in the footsteps of those exiles from the Commune and go to London. Specifically, the old abandoned hospice on Endell Street in Covent Garden, in 1915. There, female health workers created a hospital, managed and cared for only by women that came to care for 26,000 wounded during the First World War. The exciting history of this place is recorded in No place for women, by Wendy Moore (translation of Pedro Pacheco González, The lived time, Criticism).
Let’s finish this long journey close to home in time and space. Let’s go to Madrid besieged by the Civil War. Enrique Bordes and Luis de Sobrón have achieved an authentic milestone, a very powerful reference material, with Madrid Bombed. Cartography of destruction 1936-1939 (Chair), where they map and explain the devastating effects of the Francoist bombings in the capital during the war.
Here ends this journey that has taken us, hand in hand with essays and non-fiction, to travel very, very far. Did you like this trip? What more essays for travel would you recommend?
Good reading!
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