I Wrote a Book!

Hello, dear readers! It’s been a while. I haven’t posted anything in eight months. (You’re welcome!) Although I didn’t comment on the deadly attempt at overthrowing election results and hanging Vice President Pence (for the record, I was anti those things), know that my heart was with you, as President Trump’s was with the mob he had directed toward the Capitol.

The reasons behind my absence go beyond keeping spam out of your inbox. I’ve been busy! No, it’s not that I’ve been busy spending all the free money rained on us by a myopic Democratic Party eager to validate voters’ election of a near-octogenarian who may be a few articles short of a constitution. Instead, a few weeks after my last election post, I began the work of converting my most influential Western figures ranking into a book. With the help of my father’s publishing company, the New London Librarium, the book is now ready for purchase. In an era of tumult, it’s comforting to know nepotism, that old constant of human history, is alive and well.

For those of you who found this website after the series was complete, you might have no idea what this ranking even is. From 2017 to 2019, I wrote monthly entries counting down the 30 most influential figures in Western history. They could be pretty long; the average and median length was about 3,500 words. Putting them all together created a sizable work. The book is 116,000 words, making it a bit shorter than Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” (only without the teaching of manners) and a big longer than “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (only without the pushback from evangelical Christians… as of now).

The aim of the book, like the series on which it’s built, is to give readers a better mental picture of some important historical figures and how their contributions bent history in our direction. Nearly every historical figure listed is famous. You have heard of them. You might even nod along when someone else talks about the figure at a dinner party, and only then might you realize how little you actually know about Joan of Arc (#27) or Charles Darwin (#15) or Karl Marx (#9) or others on this list.

After reading just one entry, the hope is you can feel like you have much better context for that famous historical figure, earning newfound confidence and fulfillment. Then hopefully you’d read another to feel that way again. Since it’s a ranking, the 30 chapters can be read in any order, although I do often make references to figures written about earlier in the book.

For those who read much or even all of the original series published here, you might think buying the book is a waste of your hard-earned stimulus money. (It can be laborious walking to the mailbox!) I still hope it’s worth your time and investment, however. Few paragraphs survived the editing process without at least a minor change, and I also added many new paragraphs of analyses. More than that, reading something a second time always helps one retain more information, particularly if consumed through a new medium.

I’ve called the book Who Made the West: A Ranking of the 30 Most Influential Figures of Western History. It came out to about 450 pages. Because of its length and the time it took to write, people that aren’t me insist it’s worth something, so I can’t just give it away. You can buy the book after clicking this link.

I hope you’ll consider buying it for yourself and perhaps someone you know who likes history or needs to learn more about it.

Many thanks, and be well,

Ian (PPFA)