This was a book that itself potentially could have been consigned to history, given its subject matter, yet the author turns it into an interesting three-star read.

The author is trying to show future academics the trials and tribulations they will face when setting out to write such a book. This advice is primarily for academic writers, who are writing for a much more expert and select (and therefore more critical) audience, as opposed to those creating a mass-market offering. I think it also has something to offer the more general reader, who gets to look through the keyhole at the deliberative process.

He takes the life story of Elizabeth Ranke, a fictional person, and follows her as she progresses through her academic career, from choosing her college through to professorial tenure, to her very last moments alive, seeing the choices she makes (and those she doesn’t), and why. She eventually settles on feminism, and writes From Young Ladies to Wild Womyn as her dissertation. The writing has been done by Chapter 3.
The rest of the book deals with making a living as a history writer, writing to a pre-determined structure or template, and generally uses Elizabeth to “humanise” the points he is making, e.g. “she cried when she read the acknowledgement to her parents”. We are told the measure of a history book is not just what it says, but how it says it.

Throughout, she questions the viewpoints from which history is written, and her own role in history writing. For example, she remembers an old college peer Russ Doubtless who was anything but a feminist (back in the 60’s). Would he have skewed the story according to his beliefs? Did she write according to the German model (specialised and original research), or did the writer affect the writing (a historical version of Schrodinger’s cat??).

For me, I would like to have seen more of a struggle around what goes in v what gets left out, because as history gets told by the winners, I think it would have been an interesting moral dilemma for the character.

Ultimately, this is a book about how to write an academic book, get it published, and use it to build a career in academia. It is not nor intended to be a fiction story, so Elizabeth is very one-dimensional, but that suits the purpose of the author. Some of the detail may not be of interest to the average reader (e.g. the prescribed layout of such a book), but the author (through Elizabeth) does enough to keep interest from flagging.

Right from the beginning, this book did not meet my expectations, but not necessarily in a bad way. I was expecting the history of history books, how certain events are picked to put in history books, why others are left out (politics). I was expecting this to be about history textbooks and how what is in them (and what isn't) shapes what we know about history and how we define our past.

That is not what this book is.

Synopsis:
A deconstruction of the modern history book as artifact, How to Read a History Book explains who writes history books, how the writers are trained, and why they write them. It also discusses genre, bias (political and otherwise) and how to read history books between the lines. 

How to Read a History Book by Marshall T. Poe is much more about the process of researching and writing an academic, scholarly history book that, as the book states, no one besides other scholars will probably read. This is not the WWII or Civil War book you are picking up at Barnes and Noble. This is a book of years of research done by a graduate student that gets published so that graduate-student-now-professor can get tenure. But that's enough about what this book is and what it isn't. Let's talk about how this book is.

I found this book to be surprisingly interesting and I don't know exactly why. The author shows us the process of how to put together a scholarly history book and he does this through telling the fictional story of Elizabeth Ranke. She is a white, middle to upper-class woman who we follow as she goes from recent high school graduate who loves history to college graduate to tenured college professor (and even to her deathbed!). We follow Elizabeth through her struggles to get into the "right" schools, figuring out how to narrow her topic for her dissertation, and ultimately contemplating whether she did what she set out to do which was to give people a slice of what happened in the past. Elizabeth's interests and ultimately the topic her whole career is centered around is women's history (YAY!). Setting up what could have been a VERY dry topic this way is a genius move on the author's part. I found this book engaging and interesting to read. I was fully immersed in the story.

I also appreciated seeing the full journey from Elizabeth applying to college to the moment of her death. Her questioning her past work and even her dissertation that she worked so hard on is probably my favorite part. I loved how she keeps questioning herself on what her purpose was in the scholarly history world. She also keeps questioning the role of history and what it is. That was really fascinating for me, especially as I think about what the role of writing is and how words can make a difference. How her thoughts and questions are finally (kind of) answered on her deathbed could have been really cliche and poorly done but it didn't feel that way when I read it. It felt like closure after following Elizabeth through so much of her life and it wrapped up some of the final questions she had on why history was so important.

I will say I am very interested in history so that may account for how much I liked parts of this book, but I doubt many people who aren't even a little interested in history would pick this up anyways.

That is not to say there aren't any dry or boring or incredibly specific parts in this book that will make your eyes slowly start to shut.  Unless you're going to write one of these books, or for some reason wanted to know how a scholarly history book is written, some of the process that is described is in no way interesting. I appreciate the author using the fictional story of Elizabeth Ranke to help make it more palatable for a non-scholar but it's not enough. Putting together a book, researching and gathering sources, and trying to get it published is just not that captivating no matter how you try to write it. I was kind of hoping for some kind of outside interaction, like Elizabeth gets a boyfriend/girlfriend or we meet some of her friends or we see her engaging in some other activity besides working on her history book. Even if it was just for a paragraph or two it would have made her character feel a little more real. There are times when it felt like Elizabeth is just the device to get the information out there. I wanted her to go a little beyond that.

Yes, there were moments when we saw her drink too much or worry about how to pay for things or if she was doing the right thing, but it all felt like it was throwaway material. This book is trying to be fiction and nonfiction at the same time but it doesn't take enough from the fiction world for it to actually work. There needs to be more character development with Elizabeth. Or maybe we need more than just Elizabeth. Bring in her advisors more; give them more of a role. Or add a friend or colleague of Elizabeth's whose journey is different than hers. If you're going to use a fictional character to help inform the reader on what goes into the process of making a scholarly history book, give the character some depth. Elizabeth needs some more complexity.

Overall, this is a decent book. It takes a possibly boring topic and, by giving the reader a character to latch onto, makes it quite fascinating. On a scale of 5 stars, I give this a solid 3. I wouldn't have a problem reading it again, but it could be better.

How to Read a History Book: The Hidden History of History comes out January 26th, 2018.

Thank you, NetGalley and John Hunt Publishing Ltd/Zero Books for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This book introduces the reader in an easy and understandable way into the genre of history books. Through fictional stories and examples, it becomes clear what difficulties historians encounter when writing such books. It also details the function of key components of history books. The book is valuable in giving readers tools to look at history books in a more critical and reflective way. This book is helpful for everyone who likes to read history books as well as students who want to have a deeper, reflective insight into this genre.