Lots of pixels have been sac­ri­ficed over the newly released iPad and the sud­denly stolen/revealed iPhone 4 (which I’ll be first in line to pre-order or pur­chase). And while my fiancee is quite happy with her Kindle 2 and I’ve done some reading on my (now ancient) first-generation iPhone thanks to the Kindle app, I find myself turning the pages of an actual book. In this case, it’s the second edi­tion of Tufte’s “The Visual Dis­play of Quan­ti­ta­tive Infor­ma­tion”. I picked it up by attending one of his full-day classes (the main ben­efit of which is to receive the books) but never really read through it cover to cover. Well, I’m doing so now. Above good design, Tufte places an old-school emphasis on truth and honor. Visual dis­plays should never deceive. He also looks back at a great deal of his­tory, inso­much as it con­cerns the visu­al­iza­tion of information.

His­tory has been on my mind for another reason. I recently watched “Red Cliff”, a movie by John Woo. Unlike many of his more familiar films, “Red Cliff” is a his­tor­ical war epic. It con­cerns the Battle of the Red Cliffs, an event that came near to the start of what is called the Era of the Three King­doms. Since I know so little about Chi­nese his­tory, it’s dif­fi­cult for me to con­tex­tu­alize the events in the greater time­line of the region. How­ever, my fiancee was able to make com­par­isons between the events in the movie and what she’s read previously.

“Red Cliff” is a good movie, but the lasting impact it has for me is a desire to learn more about Chi­nese his­tory. It sub­se­quently occurred to me that I don’t really know all that much about Amer­ican his­tory. I have residual mem­o­ries of what we were taught in school, but I’ll admit I was never a very good His­tory stu­dent. I’ve also real­ized that like physics, his­tory is “dumbed down” for a juve­nile audi­ence. What do I really know? Not much. And what I do know is prob­ably not very useful.

If I know any­thing it’s that I should only read one book at a time. For now, I’ll work on my Tufte. After that, I should really con­sider a book on Amer­ican his­tory. But which one? Searching Amazon on my phone returned thou­sands of poten­tial options. There are many points of view, varying levels of schol­ar­ship, and books with a gen­eral view vs. books with a spe­cific focus. I’m not sure how to begin making a selection.