Not By Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History

Essays advocate that writers of history have developed their own tricks of the trade in order to be reread

In Clive's reckoning, Thomas Carlyle was "not primarily a historian," but a self-appointed prophet and sage whose hero-worship tinged his Frederick the Great , Hitler's favorite book. The theme of these erudite essays by a Harvard professor is that great historians' personal crises and childhood influences molded the way they wrote and the strategies they employed to give their writing its staying power. Edward Gibbon, presented here as a great wit--which is how his contemporaries viewed him--used sexual innuendo and sneers at religion to win over readers of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to his point of view. Thomas Macaulay, a habitual daydreamer, draped his narratives over a scaffold of seemingly haphazard anecdotes. Clive ( Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian ) also probes "enlightened conservative" Alexis de Tocqueville and Jacob Burckhardt, Swiss critic of the modern nation-state, among others. History Book Club alternate.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

These essays explore the influence of personal preoccupation in shaping the historian's choice of subject and the role played by craft in writing history. Through examination of the historical writings of Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle, Burckhardt, Tocqueville, Marx, and Adams, Clive explores "the relationship between style and content . . . " in historical writing. He argues for "literary as well as substantive molds." One seldom finds the results of serious scholarship printed as gracefully as they are in this worthwhile collection of essays on the art and craft of history writing. It is no surprise that Clive, author of a National Book Award-winning study of Macaulay ( Macaulay: The Shape of the Historian), is sympathetic to that master historian, but he is fair to all of his subjects (including the much-analyzed Carlyle). Recommended. History Book Club alternate.
- Dave Keymer, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Utica
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.