The philosopher José Antonio Marina, one of the most brilliant Spanish essayists, provides in Ariel a Universal History of Solutions, tracing different circumstances in which politics and politicians have contributed to clearly improving their society (and not complicating it).
Professor Cristóbal Aguilar Jiménez offers a very extensive Ideological History of Slavery (Almuzara), where he exposes the philosophical, legal and political thought faced with this infamous reality over 2,500 years. Oxford professor Peter Krankopan analyzes in The Transformed Earth (Criticism) the historical development of humanity through the natural mutations that the planet we inhabit has experienced. In the same publishing house, José Manuel Sánchez Ron publishes The hidden canon, a review of the hundred books on the history of science that have had the greatest real impact. Shorter but also notably ambitious are An Immense Blue, by Patrick Svensson, an approach to the history of the sea and the attempts of navigators and discoverers to reveal its mysteries (Asteroid Books). Rebecca Struthers, with GeoPlaneta, proposes in The Hands of Time an original history of watches and their social role, with examples such as the measurement of time in a very famous novel by Jules Verne.
From the general to the particular. In The Persians, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones presents Persia as “the first superpower in history” and describes how the Achaemenid monarchs ruled the greatest empire of antiquity (Atticus of the Books). Edward Dolnock tells how the Rosetta stone, a key text of ancient Egypt, was deciphered in The Writing of the Gods (Siruela).
For lovers of the classical world, Javier Murcia explains how Hellenic education worked in Masters and Disciples in Ancient Greece (Alianza). Rubén Montoya provides in Pompeii (Criticism) an analysis of the life of the buried Roman city through one hundred objects. Fernando Wull tells how the cultures of India, China and Greco-Roman converged in the Indian Ocean in the era of Emperor Trajan in On the Edge of Time (Siruela). Tom Holland, in Pax, delves into the moment of greatest splendor of the Roman Empire (Attic of Books).
Moving closer in time, the Norwegian author Bergsveinn Birgisson publishes In Search of the Black Viking, where he traces the trajectory of a countryman of his from the 9th century, Geirmunder Blackskin, who colonized Iceland, and gives us a choral portrait of the Viking world (Nordic). Antonio Espino proposes a new reading of the discovery of America in Explorers of the New World (Arpa), emphasizing the personal adventures of Columbus, Núñez de Balboa, Pizarro and Almagro.
Robert D. Kaplan, in The Loom of Time, dissects the history of the great Middle East, between the Mediterranean and China, past and current scene of epic journeys and conflicts that have marked geopolitics (RBA).
History, we have always been told, is the teacher of life, and contemporary history has undoubtedly marked ours. A very notable novelty this season is the publication of Cold Crematorío. A chronicle of Auschwitz (Debate), by the Hungarian writer and journalist József Debreczeni (1905-1978), considered one of the most striking direct testimonies of the concentration camps, compared to those of Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel.
Uwe Neumahr, German historian and editor, reconstructs in The Writers’ Castle (Debate) the stay of a large group of correspondents, some of them famous authors, in a Nuremberg castle belonging to the Faber-Castell family, to cover the process against senior Nazi officials. Erika Mann, John Dos Passos and Martha Gellhorn, among others, appear. The late Barcelona historian Joan B. Culla dedicated, together with Adrià Foret, an extensive study to Israel. The most disputed land. From Zionism to the Palestine conflict, which he reissues in Peninsula.
Mira Milosevich analyzes the Russian expansionist vocation of the 20th and 21st centuries in The Zombie Empire, Russia and the World Order (Gutenberg Galaxy).
At the Spanish level, Rafael Núñez Florencio sharply addresses the analysis of ideas in The Myth of Spanish Failure. A history of defeatism in today’s Spain (La Esfera de los Libros), about the persistence of the national “negative image” in contemporary times.
Fernando del Rey and Manuel Álvarez Tardío in Crossfire (Galaxia Gutenberg) delve into a period as glossed as it is still rich in secrets, the spring of 1936 that preceded the outbreak of the Civil War. And they study the intensification of political violence that it generated.
Finally, the University of Grenoble professor Nicolás Sesma proposes a new look at Franco’s regime in Ni una, ni grande, ni libre (Criticism), where he analyzes “the creation of a network of interests and loyalties, and the articulation of a group of collaborators and a series of organizations, which made its long duration possible.”
