The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss

This book is much more than the biography of General Alex Dumas (today best known as the father of Alexandre Dumas, author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, among many other novels). It provides a lot of context for General Dumas's life and times--including the French colony of St. Domingue, the French Revolution, and the rise of Napoleon. The book makes two arguments: that General Alex Dumas achieved remarkable success, especially given the prejudices and hardships he had to overcome--and so should be more widely remembered; and that Alexandre Dumas, the novelist, based several of his literary works, including The Count of Monte Cristo, on his father's life. I found both claims well substantiated in the biography. I enjoyed the tone, which not only detailed the general's life and helped readers with the history surrounding that time and place, but also gave a personal account of researching the biography and teasing out the relevant details (including an incident of sanctioned safe breaking!). The narrator of the audiobook had a clear and enjoyable voice. All in all, a great book to listen to.

Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution by Laurent Dubois

This book recounts the complex history of the Haitian Revolution in a readable and clear way. It gives a reasonable amount of background and does a good job tying the events in Haiti to the larger events that helped cause and provoke the Haitian Revolution (such as the political climate of France). The book insists on the importance of the Haitian Revolution beyond Haiti to world affairs and to questions of human rights. It tries to move beyond an account of just the leading generals and politicians to include a wide range of people, and it uses documentary and primary evidence where it exists. Overall this book is a great introduction to the complicated topic of the Haitian Revolution.

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

This book tells the story of the French Revolution from the perspective of three of its leaders: Danton, Robespierre, and Desmoulins. I had always taken them as the bad guys--the ones who did all the beheading. This epic story made them human to me. The plot was fascinating, the prose crisp, and the characterization marvelous.

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

This book gives a fictionalized account of Alexis de Tocqueville's trip to America. The book opens with an account of it's hero's (Olivier de Garmont) childhood, which reminds me a lot of Marcel's childhood in Swann's Way. Garmont's parents decide to send him to America to investigate the penal system (but really to escape the wave of revolutions and anti-aristocratic feeling in France); a British man working for a friend of Garmont's mother accompanies Garmont as his servant. Despite the vast differences between the two men, they form a friendship, as each learns more about America itself. This book is quite enjoyable.

Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson

This book examines the phenomenon of nationalism and attempts to place it in a new perspective, denying the myth of European origins (instead locating them in the Americas). Anderson speculates nationalism has such a pull in part because it fills in cultural gaps left by the decline of religious community and dynastic realms. He investigates the roles of vernacular language, print culture, and pilgrimages (at first bureaucratic and then educational) in creating these imagined communities and traces them from the Americas to Europe and then finally to colonial areas in Southeast Asia and Africa, where the ideas are pirated from the European colonizers. The 1991 additions are particularly interesting about maps and museums; the 2006 appendix about translations of the book struck me as insufferably self-aggrandizing.

On Revolution by Hannah Arendt

I think this book is fantastic. Arendt attempts to provide a theoretical framework for reading revolutions using both the American and the French Revolutions. In addition to her useful distinctions between liberation and freedom, Arendt usefully and skillfully draws examples from history and literature. Literate, engaging, and articulate, Arendt makes you feel like you're engaging in a great conversation with a smart friend.