Top 10 Historical Novels

Mott the Hoople

Mott the Hoople

Sweet Jane
This is probably my most favorite genre to read. It is also arguably the most difficult form of novel to write because of the research required and the mastery of two disciplines, writing and history. Here's my top 10 list of what I feel are the best historical novels I've read. My criteria for making my list is, historical accuracy, bringing historical persons/characters to life and telling a compelling story.

#10. King Rat - James Clavell. This is by far the shortest read on my list. It's about the horrors of surviving in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during WWII and how an American Corporal rises above all horrors and deprivations to become the King....of the Rats.

#9. Traveller - Richard Adams. Adams is probably more well known for his book "Watership Down". This is the best historical novel I've read about the Civil War. It's told from the point of view of Robert E. Lee's horse Traveller to his best friend, a cat and covers all of Lee major engagements during the war.

#8. The Source - James Michener. This novel is a survey of the history of the Jewish people from pre-monotheistic origins to the modern state of Israel.

#7. The Journeyer - Gary Jennings. An extraordinary novel. According to legend as Marco Polo lay dying his friends and family brought in a Priest to give him the last rights. He was abjured to recant all the lies he had told about his travels. Allegedly Polo rose up, roundly damned them all and told them he had not told them the half of what he had seen and done in his travels. This novel is about the adventures he had that were not in his book. To research this book Jennings travelled to Venice and then travelled Marco Polos route using only ancient modes of travel. Walking, sailboat, horse, camel caravans, etc.

#6. I, Claudius - Robert Graves. A novel about the Claudio/Julian dynasty as told from the perspective of the Emperor Claudius. It covers the period from Julius Ceasars assasination to Caligula's assasination and Claudius's improbable assent to being Emperor of the Roman Empire. The best historical novel I've ever read about the Roman Empire.

#5. The First Man in Rome - Colleen McCoullough. If I, Claudius is the best novel about the Roman Empire then this is the best one about the ancient Roman Republic. This is actually a series of novels that really make one very large book and begins with The First Man in Rome. It covers the period from the rise of Gaius Marius and the Marian military reforms through the rise and fall of Julius Ceaser to Octavians consolidation of power which ended the Republic and began the period of the Roman Empire. What is most remarkable about McCollough's work is how she captures the timeless humanity of political events.

#4. Shogun - James Clavell. A sweeping saga of Midevil Japan where an English ships pilot is stranded in Japan and is caught up in historical events. Clavell's ability to translate eastern culture into language westnerners can understand is nothing short of miraculous.

#3. Centenial - James Michener. Another sweeping novel only this time it is the scale of time which is sweeping. Michener, in this masterpiece, covers the grand sweep of history from it's geological origins to modern times of a mythological town in central Colorado.

#2. Aztec - Jary Jennings. This is a novel about the last 50 years of the pre-Columbian Aztec culture. The manner in which Jennings brings to life an nearly forgotten culture, place and time is simply amazing. Jennings tells the story of the last days of the Aztecs through the eyes and point of view of Mixtli, an Aztec Indian (the name means Dark Cloud). Jennings spent nearly 20 years researching and writing this novel. He lived and travelled all through Mexico for this time and even learned the Nahuatl language. This is a massive nearly thousand page novel that you can hardly put down.

#1. The Frontiersman - Allen Eckert. This book is a biopic about the Frontiersman Simon Kenton and the Shawnee leader Techumseh. To call this a historical novel is a bit of a misnomer as all the people and events described in this book actually occured. It is classified as a novel because Eckert wrote this master piece in narrative form to make the actual history of this time and place more available to the average reader who is not a professional historian. He succeeded beyond his wildest expectations and the manner in which he brings our frontier history to life is amazing. Though Eckert did make some significant historical blunders, they were honest ones that other professioanal historians also made and this is still, with out a doubt, the most well researched and documented historical novel I have ever read.
 
tell us... have you figured out how to subtract yet Mott? Still interested in that bet? If so, do try to actually return to the thread where you mocked others for their math skills and either accept the bet or tell us you were wrong.
 
Superfreak said:
tell us... have you figured out how to subtract yet Mott? Still interested in that bet? If so, do try to actually return to the thread where you mocked others for their math skills and either accept the bet or tell us you were wrong.
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Don't hijack my thread Yurt jr.

I'll go back to the original one to respond if it will make your panties feel better and yea...my bet with Damo is still on.

Oh yea.....I almost forgot......get a life! LOL
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Don't hijack my thread Yurt jr.

I'll go back to the original one to respond if it will make your panties feel better and yea...my bet with Damo is still on.

Oh yea.....I almost forgot......get a life! LOL
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Easy ditzie.... had you not run away from BOTH threads where you mocked the math skills of others, I would not have had to post it on here.

Given that it was YOU who was acting all superior and then ran away once proven wrong... it was worth coming here and mocking you.

Especially given the lame ass OP.

Bottom line, even if I didn't have a good reason for derailing your thread.... I still would have derailed this one... save people from listening to any of your mindless Ohioan crap.
 
Couldn't help but notice as well that you were able to respond on this thread, but not the others. Yet even in your response here you were not man enough to admit you were wrong.
 
History lessons for Obama and other liberals



By George F. Will, Published: May 11

Outside the venue where Rep. Paul Ryan recently spoke in Madison, Wis., a university town never lacking protesters, one product of America’s education system shouted that Ryan’s budget proposal would return America to the bad old days of the “18th-century robber barons.” The young man, full of zeal and destitute of information, does not know that those capitalists of whom he disapproves — the ones who built the railroads and other sinews of the nation’s industrial might — operated in the second half of the 19th century, not in 18th-century agrarian America.

Last month, Barack Obama was asked by an interviewer from Texas why he is so unpopular there. Obama replied: “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, for, you know, historic reasons.” Well, yes, “always” — if you believe, as many baby boomers seem to, that the world began when they became more or less sentient. But, for the record:

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Texas, one of the 11 states of the Confederacy, was, for historic reasons, part of the solidly Democratic South for almost a century after the Civil War. Deeply Protestant Texas voted for Republican Herbert Hoover against Al Smith, a Catholic New Yorker, for president in 1928, but it did not vote for a Republican presidential candidate again until Dwight Eisenhower carried the state in 1952 and 1956. It did not do so again until it picked Richard Nixon in 1972. Four years later, it embraced Jimmy Carter. Other than during Reconstruction, Texas did not elect a Republican senator until 1961 (John Tower) and did not elect a second one (Phil Gramm) until 1984, and there were not as many as three Texas Republicans in the U.S. House until 1968. Republicans were not a majority of the state’s congressional delegation until 2005.

Responding to Ryan’s budget proposal, Obama said it “would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known certainly in my lifetime. In fact, I think it would be fundamentally different than what we’ve known throughout our history.”

Well. It is unclear what “fundamentally” means to Obama, but consider some possible metrics of what is, and is not, different than what we have known “throughout our history.” Ryan’s plan would reduce federal spending as a percentage of GDP from the 2009-11 average of 24.4 to 19.9 in 10 years. It was not until the nation was 158 years old — in the Depression year of 1934, with the New Deal erupting — that peacetime federal spending topped 10 percent of GDP, and it did not reach 12 percent until the war preparations of 1941.

Ryan’s plan would alter Medicare. But Medicare has existed in its current configuration for only 46 of the nation’s 235 years.

Ryan’s plan would involve some seniors paying more of the costs of routine health care. But what is anomalous, viewed in the context of “our history,” is today’s “12 cents” problem. That is the portion of every health dollar paid by the person receiving the care. Fifty years ago, when John Kennedy became president and the nation was 185 years old, the figure was 47 cents.

Ryan’s plan would expand states’ discretion in the administration of Medicaid by making it a block-grant program. Would it make America, in Obama’s words, “fundamentally different than what we’ve known throughout our history” to take this small step away from the practice of reducing states to administrative extensions of the federal government?

The hysteria and hyperbole about Ryan’s plan arise, in part, from a poverty of today’s liberal imagination, an inability to think beyond the straight-line continuation of programs from the second and third quarters of the last century. It is odd that “progressives,” as liberals now wish to be called, have such a constricted notion of the possibilities of progress.

Liberals think Medicare and Social Security as they exist are “fundamental” to the nation’s identity. But liberals think the Constitution — which the Framers meant to be fundamental, meaning constituting, law — should be construed as a “living” document, continually evolving to take different meanings under whatever liberals consider new social imperatives.

The lesson of all this is that one’s sense of possibilities — and proprieties — is shaped by what we know, and often do not know, about history. The regnant ideology within the Obama administration and among congressional Democrats is reactionary liberalism, the conviction that whatever government programs exist should forever exist because they always have existed. That is, as baby boomers, in their narcissism — or perhaps solipsism; or both — understand “always.”
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...berals/2011/05/11/AFXxmdsG_story.html?hpid=z4
 
Outside the venue where Rep. Paul Ryan recently spoke in Madison, Wis., a university town never lacking protesters, one product of America’s education system shouted that Ryan’s budget proposal would return America to the bad old days of the “18th-century robber barons.” The young man, full of zeal and destitute of information, does not know that those capitalists of whom he disapproves — the ones who built the railroads and other sinews of the nation’s industrial might — operated in the second half of the 19th century, not in 18th-century agrarian America.
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Actually I think it's more probable that he made an error than that he literally think that the robber barons existed in the 1700's. The century terminology has always been a bit confusing - with the 19th century taking place in the 1800's, the 18th in the 1700's.
 
Last month, Barack Obama was asked by an interviewer from Texas why he is so unpopular there. Obama replied: “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, for, you know, historic reasons.” Well, yes, “always” — if you believe, as many baby boomers seem to, that the world began when they became more or less sentient. But, for the record:
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Texas has always been a Dixiecratic state. The Republican party is just the name for the new Dixiecrat party.
 
Ryan’s plan would involve some seniors paying more of the costs of routine health care. But what is anomalous, viewed in the context of “our history,” is today’s “12 cents” problem. That is the portion of every health dollar paid by the person receiving the care. Fifty years ago, when John Kennedy became president and the nation was 185 years old, the figure was 47 cents.
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Yeah, because insurance doesn't really count as paying for something. In the world at large, the amount paid by the person receiving care negatively correlates with how expensive the care is.
 
Four of my favorites~


ANTHONY GREY - SAIGON

Charles Kingsley - Westward Ho

Richard Henry Dana - Two Years Before the Mast (a personal narrative written like fiction)

Margaret George - Mary Queen of Scotts
 
Ice Dancer said:
Four of my favorites~


ANTHONY GREY - SAIGON

Charles Kingsley - Westward Ho

Richard Henry Dana - Two Years Before the Mast (a personal narrative written like fiction)

Margaret George - Mary Queen of Scotts
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Sorry, but we are no longer discussing the original topic. :)
 
Mott the Hoople said:
I will if your man enough to admit that you need to get a life! LOL
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Still no response from you on the other thread.

It has nothing to do with my 'needing a life'.... YOU made your feeble little 'jr college' comment, were subsequently shown why it was YOU that was wrong... and then you ran away with no apology or acknowledgement. So yes, I am going to mock your cowardice for that.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
They sound interesting. Can you provide a brief description?
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You mean you couldn't Google one?

Saigon begins with the romantic interest of a young man prior to the Vietnam War and so of course weaves a viewpoint of the war...a fairly evenhanded view imo.

Westward HO is really a story for young boys 12-18 year old. High adventures at Sea-mostly about exploration and trade of the South American continents, but also delves into the French and English and Spanish battles of the 16th century-historically accurate and a fast paced page turner-if you can get a copy that is illustrated by Wyeth and consider yourself blessed.

Two Years Before the Mast is in actual fact not fiction, but it is written as such. It is about an attorney in colonial America who becomes ill and it is recommended that some time at sea will be good for his health. His adventure takes him round Cape Horn in the 19th century on a sailing vessel and to the coast of CA at a time when it was still a coast of buffalo hide and animal fur traders...it also delves into his personal spiritual awakening.

Mary Queen of Scotts is pretty self evident~
 
from Mott the runner: Uhhh...boy you social science junior college boys have a hard time with math don't you? Obama won the popular vote by 6%.
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My reply:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_...election,_2008

ONCE again I will post this in response to your nonsense....

52.9% for Obama
45.7% for McCain

Equals a 7.2% difference

Now, each time we post this, you respond with 'uh, no u jr college guys no do math well'.... tell you what genius.... how about you post a link to where you are getting 6% from???
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From Mott: *chirp* *chirp* *chirp* *chirp* *chirp* *chirp*
 
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