The Great Democracies, by Winston Churchill
Our Kind, by Marvin Harris

Here, as the title suggests, are two very different takes on historical non-fiction. It’s a stretch to pair them, but I suppose they can be united thematically as something other than the usual American style of political mythology or narrative, and both books aim for a more comprehensive, broad-viewed survey of how man (or a broad swath of man) has exerted himself on the earth. I don’t want to suggest that Churchill lacks an underlying subjectivity, nor that he lacks a correspondent’s viewpoint–those things define his style–but for all that American patriots find the guy agreeable, he’s not one of them.

Marvin Harris looks at history of humankind for an anthropological perspective, and as impartially as he can, driving at a top-down description of recurring themes throughout history (and pre-history), observing the evidence of human coexistence and making inductive generalizations from the pattern of the data. This empirical view has suited my recent mental tangents very well. It’s been my growing conviction that for all the myriad ways we’re fucked up on an individual level, or even on a society level, human behavior in the aggregate is a lot more predictable and explainable than six billion partisans would have you believe.
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