Book Alert: The Historian.

Now that we are close to grudgingly accepting a Huntington-ian explanation of world affairs today, our intellectual attention has, of late, turned towards the other side of the civilisational equation: while they persist in clashing with each other in these post-capitalist times, we've been taking quite an innate fascination into how civilisations come about in the first place, and indeed, how they die.

To this end, I was actually hoping I'd pick up a copy of Collapse or Guns, Germs and Steel, or even, Thugs at our local Borders today. Alas, the first one was prohibitively expensive, the second one was out-of-stock, and the third, never stocked at all in the first place. Quite convinced that it would be futile for me to try and remember the name of another history-related book I am interested in, I have had to settle for a rather bulky historo-cultural thriller to munch on.

Two pages down now, and I can't exactly say I've settled for a lesser choice. The only question is do I treat this as fiction, or as self-evident truth? More on this on the other side of the book cover.