A cheerless but useful history.
Is there a “clash of civilizations” between the Muslim world and the West? Scholars and pundits are divided; this broad-ranging survey comes down in the affirmative, even if the formulation is a “crude but useful phrase.”
Pagden (Political Science and History/UCLA; Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present, 2001, etc.) observes that one habit of the ancient Persians puzzled the Greeks most: their prostrating themselves before rulers and gods, which was not the behavior of free people. The habit still puzzles the West, and the gulf grows ever wider. Pagden’s chronicle of a long history of mutual incomprehension begins in the age of Xerxes and wanders leisurely through ancient history, observing that “Oriental luxuriousness” set many a centurion off the straight and narrow. As Plutarch remarked, Plato wrote of four kinds of flattery, “but Cleopatra knew a thousand” and, as Pagden adds, used every one of them. Muhammad cherished luxury not at all, as the austere religion his followers spread at the point of a sword clearly indicated. That religion, writes Pagden, carried with it “perpetual hostility between Islam and both Jews and Christians.” Charged with this enmity and posing few intellectual obstacles to impede access by ordinary people, Islam became a world religion uniting ethnically diverse cultures from western Africa to the western Pacific. In the permanent battlefield that was Moorish Spain, this new religion clashed with Christianity; the front would widen to embrace the Balkans and spread into Europe as far as Vienna, where only an army of united Christian nations could stem the tide. Later encounters with Islam were no more peaceful, though peacemakers have tried: Napoleon reckoned, for instance, that as long as it was kept out of civil society, religious belief was permissible, a formula that lately met with anguished protest when French educators tried to ban the veil (and the cross, and the Star of David) from the classroom.
A cheerless but useful history.Pub Date: March 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6067-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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