Making History: the Storytellers Who Shaped the Past

Starred review from December 13, 2021
Cohen (How to Write Like Tolstoy), former publishing director of Hodder & Stoughton in the U.K., demystifies the act of history-making in this sweeping survey. He documents how European history was shaped by Greek philosophy, Roman mythology, and Judeo-Christian theology and formalized as a discipline by 19th-century German scholar Leopold von Ranke and others. Along the way, he profiles noteworthy historical figures including Isaac ibn Yashush, a Jewish physician living in 11th-century Spain who cataloged inconsistencies in the Pentateuch, and Marc Bloch, a historian turned French Resistance fighter who was executed by the Nazis in 1944. Elsewhere, Cohen examines academic debates over the ethical limits of revisionist history, analyzes the influence of cinema and digital technologies on historical scholarship, and compares ancient historians such as Thucydides and Herodotus, who “wrote to be read aloud,” with Hamilton playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda. Though the biographical minutia threatens to overwhelm, Cohen makes a persuasive argument that history is created by historians as much as by politics, war, economics, and other forces, and convincingly shows how “the rivalries of scholars, the demands of patronage, the need to make a living, physical disabilities, changing fashions, cultural pressures, religious beliefs, patriotic sensibilities, love affairs,” and other human concerns have shaped the understanding of the world. The result is a fascinating and finely wrought history of history.

Starred review from January 1, 2022

When Cohen (How To Write Like Tolstoy) was in school, his teacher was David Knowles, author of works on monasticism in medieval England. As scrupulous a historian as his mentor was, Cohen learned early that historians too have agendas: he contends that understanding a historian's ideology can help readers appreciate what's truly special in their work. This book, intended for the educated layperson, not academic specialists, is Cohen's love song to the profession of history; within its limits, it's extremely effective. Cohen's range is admirably broad: he discusses not just today's historians and their precursors but also William Shakespeare, composers of the Bible, and Samuel Pepys--all of whom, he contends, shaped perceptions of history scholarship, popular history, today's historical fiction, and the depiction of history on TV. Though mostly focusing on Western historiography, the book also touches on the influence of Arab historians and includes brief sections on Chinese and Japanese historical writing; the scantness of these sections is the book's only drawback. Overall, Cohen's judgments are insightful, thought-provoking, and thoroughly researched. VERDICT History lovers will find this exceptionally well-written book as insightful as it is a pleasure to read.--David Keymer

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2022
Former book publisher Cohen surveys the state of history writing over the past two millennia. This wide-ranging account hits most of the predictable points in a traditional, occasionally entertaining introductory-level course on the writers of history in Western civilization. Cohen, the author of How To Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers and other books, begins with a chapter on Herodotus and Thucydides and then moves steadily forward, with chapters on Latin historians, medieval European historians, Civil War historians, "The Red Historians: From Karl Marx to Eric Hobsbawm," and so forth. The work of Herodotus, he writes, "brought into play...a special kind of inquiry--one that encompasses geography, ethnography, philology, genealogy, sociology, biography, anthropology, psychology, and imaginative re-creation (as in the arts)." Cohen seldom considers history as written by scholars other than those in Europe and, later, North America, and he recapitulates the biography of each of the historians he considers, which leads to an uneven text. For example, he spends more time on Voltaire's many mistresses than on his thoughts and writings. This makes for smooth but rarely thought-provoking reading. While the book is useful as a broad overview for neophytes, readers looking for fresh insights into history and history writing should look elsewhere. As the narrative progresses, Cohen tends increasingly to group historians together not so much by historical period or approach to the subject matter as by less relevant standards. A chapter titled "Herstory" lumps together women scholars from the past 2,000 years, from Chinese historian and philosopher Ban Zhao to notable 20th-century historians Barbara Tuchman and Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the chapter on Black historians could have been more well considered. (Overall, the book is notable more for its length than depth.) Cohen branches out to consider, though seldom favorably, novelists, journalists, TV producers, and photographers as historians. The book is amply illustrated with photographs, maps, and cartoons. Lively but long-winded and largely superficial biographies of historians through the ages.

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