Dig into this shit, mutherfucker. I've got two books to go. The 10th, Rousseau and Revolution, is the one that won the Pulitzer. It's also 965 pages, not including the index and appendices. I own Gore Vidal's copy of the books, but I do them as audiobooks. This allows me to digest them as I roll through homelessness and heat. And having burned through more than 8,000 pages of history, I can say two things: 1) they don't make you learn more than the broad strokes because the minutiae, in the end, doesn't fucking matter 2) history is nothing more than an endless expanse of humans being horrific to each other. Thanks to these books, I now hate the English, the French, the Spanish, the Germans, the Italians, the Swiss, the Swedes, the Romans, the Chinese, the Japanese and the Turks and have developed the suspicion that if there's a statue of you somewhere, it's been erected on a mountain of skulls.However, there's only so much one can take of things like The Dead Hand and Legacy of Ashes.