The writing craft is as impossible to master as quantum mechanics. Genetics endows some blessed souls with instinctive mastery; the rest of us struggle and struggle some more. I’m a sucker for ‘how to write’ books, the more the better. Most add little, reflecting, I sometimes reflect, more on my stubborn brain than on the well-meaning instructors.
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, by John Lewis Gaddis, is not a ‘how to’ – it’s a methodological thesis for working historians, written by one of the most distinguished historians of the Cold War – but I treated it as such. I’m new to writing history and needed a guiding hand. Well, I could not have latched onto a wiser teacher. In elegant, wry prose, Gaddis explains what modern historical consciousness is like (I’d never even considered the question, more fool me!) and how historians (or at least Gaddis himself – he freely invites controversy) go about their work. Post-modernism, science versus social science, and even morality, are all integrated into a pleasing whole.
I scribbled pages of notes on how The Landscape of History can illuminate my current project. What more could I ask for?