Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookpossum
You amaze me! I gave Carradine all the credit he deserved for all the documents he found. About the only contribution Grant made was in suggesting Carradine look for a smear campaign about Richard in France after Carradine found one in the fen country.
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Grant got Carradine onto the more interesting study in the first place, which is where Carradine's sense of obligation comes from, even though it is obviously (even in 1950s) a path well studied by others (and so one should not be too quick to jump to conclusions - I'm looking at you, supposedly professional inspector Alan Grant!).
But despite all the work by the "Woolly lamb" (our author was happy to spread the name calling around), we still had all that awkward back and forth at the end where Carradine was trying to offer Grant the chance to take this forward on his own. It seemed apparent to me that the author expects us to think of this as Grant's project, graciously handed on to the lesser Carradine; after all, we already know what Grant thinks of historians, and that is what Carradine is going off to become ... now that he has been pointed down the right path by our hero.
It seems you got a different impression of the ending. I suppose that should not surprise me, my reaction to this book has obviously been tainted by my reaction to the main protagonist.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookpossum
To me the book was all about going to the primary sources and not to secondary sources, ie the documents of the time rather than reading and trusting history books as the sole source of any case you are trying to build.
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We might say that the first message is not to rely fictional sources (Shakespeare). The second is probably that what you learned in school x years ago could well be out of date by now. Another is that people with bias and prejudice don't make for reliable sources - whether contemporary or not (eg. John Morton and information based on him as a source). And then, with all those things taken into account, primary sources - where available - are preferable to secondary sources. If this last is a priority of the book, then the thing with the painting should have been addressed, because is that most definitely not a primary source, and that's how this all got started in the first place.
And at the end we have Carradine going off to write a history book - a secondary source that the our lesson for today has been not to trust. Is there a mixed message in here somewhere?