David Gibbins, A History of the World in 12 Shipwrecks

It's a weirdly niche genre, the History of the World in-- approach (47 borders, 6 glasses, 100 objects, etc), and David Gibbins has joined it with his determinedly nonfiction History of the World in 12 Shipwrecks.

Let me be clear: I fly my nerd flag proudly, and I've very happily read books about zero, unionization in the BC forest sector, mole-hunting (not a euphemism, somehow), semicolons, even chopping and storing firewood. When I say that this might be the nerdiest book I've ever read, this means Gibbins is clearing a very high bar indeed:

"I had seen a similar use of the veins in marble in the sixth-century Basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Classe, the port city on the Adriatic that had been the capital of the Ostrogoths in Italy and became the Byzantine capital in the west after Belisarius captured it in 540...." (p90)

This book is twelve chapters long, each one about a different shipwreck, most of them wrecks that Gibbins has visited himself as a diver, and several of them wrecks that he has researched intensively as an academic. Gibbins uses each chapter as a way to explain how the ship intersected with as many strands as he can conjure up from the ship's contemporaneous world:

"Wider afield, this was the time of Louis the Pious, King of the Franks in succession to his father Charlemagne, and shortly before the birth of King Alfred the Great of the Anglo-Saxons. It was also a time of great natural phenomena: in 837 Halley's Comet came closer than it had ever done to Earth, an event recorded globally that provided a common experience to peoples still unknown to each other, separated by vast tracts of land and sea as yet unexplored" (p109).

It's extremely rare that I find a book too nerdy for my tastes, but somehow, that's where I've landed with A History of the World in 12 Shipwrecks.

Gibbins is erudite and thoughtful, his writing direct but somehow excitable, and I came away confident that I'd been in the company of a generous person who knew vastly, vastly more than I do about this subject. His web page for the book features a PDF list of sources for all quotations in thus un-footnoted book, and there's a page for each chapter of background, context, and videos, all of which adds up to a really impressive archive that makes this book even more valuable for the right kind of nerd.

And I hope you are one! Sadly, I'm not, and this really does make me a little sad.