Book talk about a book talk

I was reading this recent book review in the New York Times; Lakota America by Pekka Hamalainen. The reviewer, Parul Sehgal, pointed out two characteristics of the book which intrigue me and draw me in as a reader of histories:

The challenge of writing this history, Hamalainen notes, was making iconic events and figures unfamiliar again, which is never more necessary than at the twilight of the Lakota empire.

I like that idea; making the iconic events unfamiliar so that we have the chance to reorient our perspective; becoming more open, hopefully to new ideas.  And then this other:

In retrospect, history often seems preordained; vulnerabilities seem garishly announced, outcomes a matter of course. Hamalainen seeks…to infuse a sense of chance and contingency in the narrative, to remain “alive to the ever-present possibility that events could have turned out differently.” He sows this feeling of uncertainty into the composition of the book, replacing a traditional arc with “a more unpredictable narrative structure that is full of triumphs, twists, reversals, victories, lulls and low points, big and small. If the book’s Lakotas — haughty and imperial at one moment, fearful and vulnerable the next, prudent and accommodating the third — seem strange and unfamiliar, this portrayal has succeeded.

Chance and contingency frame so much of our lives, it seems entirely appropriate and strategic to frame a history the same way.

Gotta get me this book.