A leading Orientalist examines Muslim perceptions of Europe from the Arab conquests through the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, some 1200 years—and, in the aggregate, condemns Muslims for failing to see and value the West as Westerners do. Drawing on diverse Arab, Turkish, and Persian writings, Lewis (The Emergence of Modern Turkey, The Middle East and the West) defines the practical and intellectual limits to Muslim knowledge of Europe in chapters on language, intermediaries, and scholarship; then—re religion, economic relations, government and justice, science and techology, cultural life, and social mores—he proceeds to show the paucity of timely and accurate information about Europe available even to Muslim elites. In recording the curious observations of his sources, Lewis expands on an argument from his earlier works: in contrast to their European counterparts, and to their great disadvantage, Middle Eastern Islamic societies had little interest in learning about their millenial rival. Contributory factors, in Lewis' view, were religious prohibition and contempt for a super-ceded religion; the cultural superiority of Islam in the Middle Ages, plus its military power and economic self-sufficiency; and the difficulties encountered by those few Muslims who ventured into Europe. Only with the defeats of the 17th and 18th centuries did the Ottoman Empire acknowledge Western progress and, through observation and instruction, seek the sources of Western strength. Lewis' clear, forceful prose and an introductory chapter on Islamic-European relations from the 7th to the early 19th century make unfamiliar material accessible to nonspecialists. The book does, moreover, provide something of a historical framework for understanding contemporary Islamic reactions against Westernization. But the vast time-span fails to do justice to periods of varying intake and outthrust; the underlying thesis fails to explain the varying response of different Islamic societies to Westernization; pre-modern developments fail to account for the intensity of today's animus/attraction. Lewis has been severely criticized—most prominently, by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978)—for his assumptions about the inferiority of Islam. In form and content, this new book is similarly vulnerable.
Pub Date: June 21, 1982
ISBN: 0393321657
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.
A firsthand account of how the Navajo language was used to help defeat the Japanese in World War II.
At the age of 17, Nez (an English name assigned to him in kindergarten) volunteered for the Marines just months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Growing up in a traditional Navajo community, he became fluent in English, his second language, in government-run boarding schools. The author writes that he wanted to serve his country and explore “the possibilities and opportunities offered out there in the larger world.” Because he was bilingual, he was one of the original 29 “code talkers” selected to develop a secret, unbreakable code based on the Navajo language, which was to be used for battlefield military communications on the Pacific front. Because the Navajo language is tonal and unwritten, it is extremely difficult for a non-native speaker to learn. The code created an alphabet based on English words such as ant for “A,” which were then translated into its Navajo equivalent. On the battlefield, Navajo code talkers would use voice transmissions over the radio, spoken in Navajo to convey secret information. Nez writes movingly about the hard-fought battles waged by the Marines to recapture Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and others, in which he and his fellow code talkers played a crucial role. He situates his wartime experiences in the context of his life before the war, growing up on a sheep farm, and after when he worked for the VA and raised a family in New Mexico. Although he had hoped to make his family proud of his wartime role, until 1968 the code was classified and he was sworn to silence. He sums up his life “as better than he could ever have expected,” and looks back with pride on the part he played in “a new, triumphant oral and written [Navajo] tradition,” his culture's contribution to victory.
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-425-24423-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
A valiant effort to explain and make peace with war’s awesome consequences for human beings.
A manual for soldiers or anyone interested in what can happen to mind, body and spirit in the extreme circumstances of war.
Decorated Vietnam veteran Marlantes is also the author of a bestselling novel (Matterhorn, 2010), a Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar. His latest book reflects both his erudition and his battle-hardness, taking readers from the Temple of Mars and Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey into the hell of combat and its grisly aftermath. That Marlantes has undertaken such a project implies his acceptance of war as a permanent fact of human life. We go to war, he says, “reluctantly and sadly” to eliminate an evil, just as one must kill a mad dog, “because it is a loathsome task that a conscious person sometimes has to do.” He believes volunteers rather than conscripts make the best soldiers, and he accepts that the young, who thrill at adventure and thrive on adrenaline, should be war’s heavy lifters. But apologizing for war is certainly not one of the strengths, or even aims, of the book. Rather, Marlantes seeks to prepare warriors for the psychic wounds they may endure in the name of causes they may not fully comprehend. In doing that, he also seeks to explain to nonsoldiers (particularly policymakers who would send soldiers to war) the violence that war enacts on the whole being. Marlantes believes our modern states fail where “primitive” societies succeeded in preparing warriors for battle and healing their psychic wounds when they return. He proposes the development of rituals to practice during wartime, to solemnly pay tribute to the terrible costs of war as they are exacted, rather than expecting our soldiers to deal with them privately when they leave the service. He believes these rituals, in absolving warriors of the guilt they will and probably should feel for being expected to violate all of the sacred rules of civilization, could help slow the epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans.
A valiant effort to explain and make peace with war’s awesome consequences for human beings.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1992-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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