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
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
Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The...
Former Secretary of State Clinton tells—well, if not all, at least what she and her “book team” think we ought to know.
If this memoir of diplomatic service lacks the preening self-regard of Henry Kissinger’s and the technocratic certainty of Dean Acheson’s, it has all the requisite evenhandedness: Readers have the sense that there’s not a sentence in it that hasn’t been vetted, measured and adjusted for maximal blandness. The news that has thus far made the rounds has concerned the author’s revelation that the Clintons were cash-strapped on leaving the White House, probably since there’s not enough hanging rope about Benghazi for anyone to get worked up about. (On that current hot-button topic, the index says, mildly, “See Libya.”) The requisite encomia are there, of course: “Losing these fearless public servants in the line of duty was a crushing blow.” So are the crises and Clinton’s careful qualifying: Her memories of the Benghazi affair, she writes, are a blend of her own experience and information gathered in the course of the investigations that followed, “especially the work of the independent review board charged with determining the facts and pulling no punches.” When controversy appears, it is similarly cushioned: Tinhorn dictators are valuable allies, and everyone along the way is described with the usual honorifics and flattering descriptions: “Benazir [Bhutto] wore a shalwar kameez, the national dress of Pakistan, a long, flowing tunic over loose pants that was both practical and attractive, and she covered her hair with lovely scarves.” In short, this is a standard-issue political memoir, with its nods to “adorable students,” “important partners,” the “rich history and culture” of every nation on the planet, and the difficulty of eating and exercising sensibly while logging thousands of hours in flight and in conference rooms.
Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The guiding metaphor of the book is the relay race, and there’s a sense that if the torch is handed to her, well….Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5144-3
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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