A World Lit Only by Fire By William Manchester (1992)
1. William Manchester's panoramic chronicle traces Europe's transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, but the book's final section pauses on the specifics of the premodern Age of Sail. Those passages capture the rewards and perils of long-distance ocean voyages through an in-depth account of the globe's first circumnavigation, the voyage of the Spanish carrack Victoria in 1519-22, and the fates of the other four ships in its expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan. Manchester plumbs the mariners' feelings of fear and wonder, the violent cultural clashes abroad, the collective perseverance of the sailors and officers, and the hunger that turned the crew into "emaciated, hollow-cheeked wraiths" with ulcerated flesh and scurvy-swollen gums. An accomplished biographer of 20th-century leaders such as Winston Churchill, Manchester offers a vivid portrait of Magellan, "meticulous, fiercely ambitious, stubborn, driven, secretive, and iron-willed." The Victoria returned home as "a listing wreck of groaning timbers taking in water from every seam." Its original crew of 265 sailors had been reduced to 18 "skeletal phantoms." Their damaged ship was the only one to circle the globe. Magellan, who had been killed in the Philippines, was among the many lost along the way.
The Tale of Genji By Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 1021)
2. This portrait of life among Japan's ruling elite during the early 11th century is sometimes called humanity's first novel. Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting in the imperial court, initiates the reader into the romances and political intrigues of her fellow aristocrats. Called "cloud dwellers," the inhabitants of this rarefied set often communicated via poems that encoded messages about relationships, love or the intrigues of power. "In poetry people could address each other from the heart," Royall Tyler notes in the introduction to his 2001 translation. Nearly 800 poems are woven throughout this work, which turns on the love life and political ascent of the courtier of the title. For all its dreamlike beauty, "The Tale of Genji" also features nightmarish events, including kidnapping, suicide, child marriage and untimely death. Genji mourns his wife in a poem: "Crying as geese cry, I made my way home again in a fleeting world / where no creature ever finds a haven beyond time." The novel is saturated with the Japanese concept of mono no aware, the wistful sorrow or pathos of impermanence.
Inside the Victorian Home By Judith Flanders (2003)
3. The upper- and middle-class homes of Victorian London were organized around comfort and an ethic of respectable domesticity that took its tone from the royal family. As Judith Flanders's work of social history reveals, these households were also busy workplaces for the servants who kept them running. In 1851 one-third of London women between the ages of 15 and 24 worked as servants. The average housemaid "had less fresh air than a factory worker," according to Ms. Flanders. Most did "at least twelve hours of heavy physical labor every day, which was two hours more than a factory worker (four hours more on Saturdays)." Maids often left home at a young age to live with their employers. Servants were on call to clean, cook and wait on their employers from 5 or 6 a.m., working until 10 p.m. or even midnight. Much of their near-constant labor was hidden away in squalid kitchens and sculleries. When the writer Beatrix Potter visited her grandparents in the summer of 1886, her servants "had to sit on the kitchen table" while working, "as the floor heaved with cockroaches."
Hubbub By Emily Cockayne (2007)
4. In the midst of a 1662 London banquet, one observer looked over at Catherine of Braganza, the sumptuously attired queen of England, and noted that sweat was causing the royal makeup to run. Such tidbits fill every page of Emily Cockayne's "Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600-1770." She transports the reader to an era of intellectual accomplishment, in which the philosopher John Locke, the physicist Isaac Newton and the poet John Milton created monuments of human thought in the midst of less-than-serene surroundings. Ms. Cockayne, a scholar of material history, leads readers through early modern England's sewage-filled streets and smoke-choked homes, often through the descriptions of those who lived there. London's bread, as one writer of the day notes, was "a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes." At every turn, Ms. Cockayne seeks out "what made eyes water, ears ache, noses wrinkle, fingers withdraw and mouths close." The answer is so ugly, itchy, moldy, noisy, grotty, busy, dirty and gloomy that those adjectives lend their names to the chapters. At points "Hubbub" is as potent as the smell of the London pigsty that forced "visitors to the house opposite . . . to hold their noses."
The Gulag Archipelago By Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1973)
5. To compose his monumental account of the Soviet prison-camp system, Alexander Solzhenitsyn immersed himself in countless letters and reports, as well as his own memories of his eight years surviving such camps as the one at Ekibastuz, in what is now Kazakhstan. There, resistance took many forms, from a fellow prisoner's religious poetry to hunger strikes, escape attempts and the killing of informers by their fellow inmates. "I have come almost to love that monstrous world," Solzhenitsyn admits of his experience revisiting the "almost invisible, almost imperceptible country" of the gulags. Captivity becomes strangely captivating as the author explores how the camps reshaped their prisoners' inner worlds. Solzhenitsyn maps the suffering and resilience of these "invisible slaves of the Archipelago" and cautions readers about the dangers of historical amnesia. Quoting a Russian proverb, he warns: "Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye. Forget the past and you'll lose both eyes."
-- Ms. Follett is the author of "The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past."