Thoughtful, outspoken words from a sage who has lived his share of history.
One of the first Orientalists in Britain shares his long historical trajectory, from London to the Middle East to Princeton.
Lewis (Eastern Studies Emeritus/Princeton Univ.; The End of Modern History in the Middle East, 2011, etc.) was born in 1916 and is still astoundingly prolific and relevant, as demonstrated in recent bestsellers What Went Wrong? (2002) and The Crisis of Islam (2004). In episodic, wittily composed chapters, he addresses salient events in his career as a historian of the Near and Middle East—e.g., the process of learning numerous difficult languages and formative influences such as being born a nonreligious Jew in London. Enamored early on with exotic languages, he taught himself Italian and Hebrew, then at the University of London (his father wouldn’t let his only child go to Oxford because “it was just a place where students spent all their time drinking and partying”) he entered the relatively untried field of Oriental Studies and tackled Arabic. In this prewar era, his teachers followed a philological, textual approach, rather than historical. When he chose “the Eastern Question” in terms of the Ottoman Empire, he was encouraged to study the British, French, German and Russian documents, but not the Turkish. After the war, which Lewis spent with British intelligence doing decoding and translating work, he headed for Istanbul, determined to delve into the Ottoman archives, and emerged with an important early work, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961). In a lifelong pursuit of an unbiased and accurate historical method, he has often served as a kind of cultural diplomat, lecturing in America and translating for dignitaries, and he urges the guarding of one’s “scholarly impartiality” and against prejudice. He writes frankly of his long tenure at Princeton, the dicey Israel-Palestinian crisis, the eclipse of secularism in the Muslim world and the “dangerous trend…of intellectual protectionism” advocated by Edward Said et al.
Thoughtful, outspoken words from a sage who has lived his share of history.Pub Date: May 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02353-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
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