by Chris Lowney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 6, 2005
Lowney’s treatment is less fluent than María Rosa Menocal’s Ornament of the World (2002), but still of much interest to...
A thoughtful visit to medieval Spain, where Christians, Jews, and Muslims once lived side by side—and the Muslims were in charge.
The Visigothic rulers of post–Roman Spain were great warriors and reasonably able administrators. Still, writes Lowney (Heroic Leadership, 2003), they ushered in “the economic and cultural stagnation that later historians dubbed the Dark Ages” even as they promulgated anti-Semitic laws that punished a people who, some historians hazard, were in Spain even before Christianity took root. Then came the year 711, when 10,000 Moorish soldiers swiftly conquered most of the Iberian peninsula, establishing Muslim rule over five million inhabitants and instituting a government that extended more or less equal rights to all. In the golden age that ensued (which is not to be confused with the golden age of Phillip II), Spain became a center of learning and culture as encyclopedists and mathematicians filled the plazas of Granada and Seville; al-Andalus taught the future Pope Gerbert how to do his numbers and allowed the courtier and poet Samuel ha-Nagid to become “the most extraordinarily accomplished Jew not only in Spain but anywhere in medieval Christendom, and one of the most accomplished in any era in European history.” Though religious and ethnic tensions were far from unknown during the eight centuries of Muslim rule, fraternity was the order of the day; Lowney cites, for instance, legal records recording the aftermath of interfaith bouts of drinking and carousing, when partiers of all faiths wound up in the hoosegow to sleep it off. Other kinds of mixing exercised the wrath of the Catholic hierarchy outside Spain, and when the Muslims were finally driven from Iberia in 1492—and Jews who refused to convert expelled immediately thereafter—those Spaniards who advocated the view that ecumenicalism was possible were tortured and burned at the stake for their trouble.
Lowney’s treatment is less fluent than María Rosa Menocal’s Ornament of the World (2002), but still of much interest to those seeking evidence that we can, in fact, all get along.Pub Date: April 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4359-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
Share your opinion of this book
by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Tom Clavin
BOOK REVIEW
by Tom Clavin
BOOK REVIEW
by Tom Clavin
BOOK REVIEW
by Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
Share your opinion of this book
More by Bob Woodward
BOOK REVIEW
by Bob Woodward & Robert Costa
BOOK REVIEW
by Bob Woodward
BOOK REVIEW
by Bob Woodward
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.