[Unearned5161]

I am really enjoying Crucible of War by Fred Anderson, it's about the 7 year war (1756-1763?) and essentially how it lay the pretext for the American War of Independence but is often overlooked by modern teaching. For me it strikes the right balance for something that has citations for almost everything, but at the same time is fluid to read and you can get into a groove with his battle and scene descriptions. He also manages to deal with bias rather well, which is a tricky thing to do and is what many books that you cite have struggled with (that and rigor of writing), especially when dealing with the assymetry of information available about the time (much more writings from the British/french side than the Indian). He includes this fact in his writing so that you don't get the impression that this is the whole picture. One more thing I see as another potential folly for many pophistory books is breadth. Many tend to take much to big a bite of history and attempt to get it all in ~800 pages, that's not going to happen unless you do some major glossing over at some parts. A book that's considered "good history" I've noticed will be shorter in focus length (not to be confused with book length), if the author wants to write about a whole century or two, they'll split it up into several books. Overall I think it's a great book for someone that wants to get into more rigorous historical text. And I think it's important to remember that not everything has to be fun, in the end what we're doing is reading past events, some events are going to be interesting to you, others not so much. Find your interests and read history books about that, it'll do some of the "fun to read" legwork.