Original link:http://www.ideobook.com/3143/making-history-menand-review/
Louis Menand reviews Richard Cohen’s new book Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past (Simon & Schuster, 2022): Web: The People Who Decide What Becomes History Print: Gibbon’s Left Testicle. The New Yorker, April 18, 2022, pp. 63-65. The title of the print edition of the book review, “Yoshimoto’s Left Testicle,” is clearly the work of a headliner (the title printed on the magazine’s catalog page is actually “Historians and the writing of history”), which is quite eye-catching. The title of the online version is quite satisfactory, pointing out the theme, because the book reviewed is about the “storyteller”, that is, the history writer (or historian in the broadest sense). The title party belongs to the title party. For such a book, it is only right that the book review chooses to introduce the theme from Gibbon. In fact, it did give me a little knowledge. One is Gibbon’s “tragic” life, and the other is the influence of his life on his historical writing. Taken together, it is the theme of the book review article and the book itself. What happened to Gibbon’s left testicle? This question got the point – “It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” Those are the words of Edward Gibbon,…
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