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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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