History,

especially Ancient, is one of my abiding loves. So I've just finished The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. It's a fascinating attempt to think the process of history (as in the writing thereof by historians) through. He is critical of the social sciences' pursuit of formulas based on independent variables that result in reproducible predictions. He assures the reader that social sciences have an abysmal record of prediction and implies that it is their emulation of the Newtonian-style hard sciences that has led them down this dead end.

He introduces Relativity, Uncertainty, Chaos and Fractal Geometry to illustrate how the practice of history is at least similar to these examples of the "New" "Hard" "Science". This "Hard-Science-Envy" seems to me to simply mirror the social sciences he critiques. But he is humorous, well-read and very informative. Well worth the time.