I think it finally just got to the point where there wasn't any new insight I could glean from their horrors -- kind of like specializing in the study of a particular serial killer, hearing everything he has had to say at least three times over, and him still blustering along but providing no new information. In other words, a crashing bore.
For the past couple of months, at least, I've been immersing myself in the Golden Age of Exploration, which is mentally a lot less taxing to absorb and doesn't leave me in a semi-depressed state most of the time.
I'm now on Henry Morton Stanley, having already done Shackleton, Scott, Mawson and Amundsen umpteen times, and find this corner of exploration lore to be almost as, if not more, gripping than that of the polar types, because of the addition of the anthropological side of things -- namely, brutal, restless natives. Lots of them (penguins do not make for a lot of dramatic pauses).
In this vein I think I shall continue, because I have so much more reading to be done -- I've started on Hernan Cortés and no doubt that will lead to Pissarro, and I still have Darwin and countless others: Newton, Socrates, Napoleon and many, many other figures of history that must be studied.
Lucky for me, I have the Apple TV, upon which resides YouTube (and others) which provide an endless audio-visual backup to all those incredible stories.
And I don't have to read about madmen and murders every day. How much more lighthearted I feel, overall. A couple of Aztecs piercing tongues with ropes, hordes of natives being offed with antique Spanish blunderbusses . . . greed, greed, viciousness, lust and more greed . . . bring it on!
See what a little de-Nazification can do for a soul? Hmm . . .though there's the nagging omission of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which still needs to be consumed and digested . . . may give that one a dig after I'm done with old Stanley here. Oh, and the Indian Mutiny -- must add that to my list.
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