If we begin the review of the history books published in recent months that can become a good gift for Sant Jordi in chronological order, we will place ourselves in antiquity. The Greek world is approached in an original way in Athens 403: a choral history (Siruela) by Vincent Azoulay and Paulin Ismard. The date of the title refers to a historical moment in which, after the defeat in the Peloponnesian War, the city was politically taken over by a commission of oligarchs who abolished democracy. This led to a civil war whose result was the restoration of democratic order.
For his part, the specialist in historical novel Valerio Massimo Manfredi brings together in Six History Lessons (Edhasa) a bunch of articles and conferences on this period. It addresses everything from figures such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to the most relevant inventions of antiquity and the sea voyages of the Carthaginians in search of the end of the world.
In this book, Manfredi also makes some foray into the Middle Ages, a time that Ian Mortimer portrays in a very original and ingenious way in his Guide to Time Travel to Medieval England (Captain Swing). The author answers all kinds of practical questions and curiosities about the hard daily life at the time; For example, what did they use when toilet paper had not yet been invented?
In Hispanos (La Esfera de los Libros) the popularizer Fernando DÃaz Villanueva reviews two thousand years of cultural history of Hispanics, from the Roman Empire to the present, through the colonization of America. Sticking to more specific periods, three novelties study aspects of the modern history of Spain. On the one hand, Jorge Vilches addresses in The First Spanish Republic (1873-1874) (Espasa) the convulsive attempt at political regeneration after the fiasco and flight of the monarch Amadeo de Saboya. The republican experiment had in its short life no less than five presidents and ended in political brawl and military pronouncement.
For his part, Javier Moreno Luzón studies in The Patriot King: Alfonso XIII and the Nation (Galaxia Gutenberg) a figure that has already given rise to many biographies. His approach focuses on the political dimension of the monarch in the construction of the national identity of modern Spain, not exempt from contradictions. The abrupt end of his reign marked the advent of the Second Republic, a political stage dealt with by Julio Gil Pecharromán in Los años republicanos (1931-1936) (Taurus), an ambitious work on a troubled period and always subject to debate, which the author tries to analyze it in a panoramic and equanimous way, with all its lights and shadows.
In those same years, as a result of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, German Jewish intellectuals began to arrive in Jerusalem, settling in the Rehavia neighborhood, including the writers Else Lasker-Schüler, Gershom Scholem and Martin Buber. The newcomers forged a German-Jewish cultural community whose story is told by Thomas Sparr at Grunewald in the East: German-Jewish Jerusalem (Cliff). And if we talk about this period, there is a classic theme that never fails to produce a bibliography: the Second World War.
The most entertaining The Prisoners of Colditz (Critical) by Ben McIntyre stands out, a story of the ingenious escape attempts from the castle turned into a Nazi prison for allied officers. The subject has given rise to films and series that have forged a heroic myth, but the author addresses it by providing a dose of reality and silenced edges.
In those troubled years, specifically in 1940, Ramon Mercader assassinated Trotski in Mexico on Stalin’s orders. Behind this murderer of Catalan origin was a mother, Caridad Mercader, who came from the upper bourgeoisie and who ended up becoming a communist fanatic and spy at the service of Moscow. Her story is told by Gregorio Luri in The Promised Sky. A woman in the service of Stalin (Ariel).
The echoes of the Soviet Union and its fall resonate in the current war in Ukraine. Karl Schlögel introduces us to Ukraine, a crossroads of cultures. A story of eight cities (Cliff) on the complex history and rich cultural heritage of this country. Cities like Lviv, Odesa, Chernivtsi, Kyiv, Kharkov, Donetsk and Yalta allow us to draw a panorama of the culture of this country marked by the fact that it is the border between the West and Russia. Ukraine also appears in Between East and West (Debate), by the great American historian and journalist Anne Applebaum. It is the account of the trip that she made in 1991, during the disintegration of the Soviet empire, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, also passing through other countries such as Lithuania and Belarus.
And we have reserved for last the most ambitious work, the pharaonic The World (Critique) by Simon Sebag Montefiore. It is about summarizing in almost fifteen hundred pages the complete history of humanity. He does it by pulling the thread of the successive dynasties that have held political and economic power. A risky endeavor from which the author comes out reasonably gracefully thanks to his narrative agility and his abundant anecdotes.