A fresh, complex story of how historical perceptions come into being and are used to persuade and rule.
A book with two purposes: to narrate the history of Rome while revealing how the ancient tale of Rome’s repeated decline, fall, and renewal affected history and politics across the world.
History professor Watts accomplishes an impressive feat by effectively compressing the vast history of Rome and its empire into a relatively short book. For nonacademic readers, however, following the massive cast of characters—emperors, generals, religious leaders, crusaders, poets, and historians from all of Europe and the Middle East—may sometimes prove difficult. The author takes us through many “sacks of Rome” and the community’s transformation from city to empire before moving on to the great contest between Christianity and Islam, the church’s conquest of Latin America, and the modern day. In such an abbreviated history of much of the Western World, Watts succeeds admirably in his purpose. But his truly novel contribution is his ability to weave in the ways that the “deeply entrenched narrative” of Roman decline and recovery accompanied Rome’s growth in the second century B.C.E. and on to its commanding position in the western empire as the seat of Catholicism, before the break with Constantinople. The author engagingly shows how, from the start, Roman leaders used that cyclical narrative of deterioration and restoration both to govern and to divide their people. Long before Edward Gibbon’s celebrated work on Rome’s decline and fall, the city had already, in many people’s view, repeatedly “fallen.” This belief continued into the modern era. The American “Founding Fathers” were its legatees; Mussolini employed it to rouse his fascist faithful; and even Ronald Reagan and Phyllis Schlafly invoked it in the 1980s. By our time, Rome’s condition had become a “powerful metaphor to speak about the present and future that was now open to all who wished to evoke it.”
A fresh, complex story of how historical perceptions come into being and are used to persuade and rule.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-19-007671-9
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
HISTORY | ANCIENT | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An erudite guide to the biblical world.
Revelations from the Old Testament.
“The Bible has no rivals when it comes to the art of omission, of not saying what everyone would like to know,” observes Calasso (1941-2021), the acclaimed Italian publisher, translator, and explorer of myth, gods, and sacred ritual. In this probing inquiry into biblical mysteries, the author meditates on the complexities and contradictions of key events and figures. He examines the “enigmatic nature” of original sin in Genesis, an anomaly occurring in no other creation myth; God’s mandate of circumcision for all Jewish men; and theomorphism in the form of Adam: a man created in the image of the god who made him. Among the individuals Calasso attends to in an abundantly populated volume are Saul, the first king of Israel; the handsome shepherd David, his successor; David’s son Solomon, whose relatively peaceful reign allowed him “to look at the world and study it”; Moses, steeped in “law and vengeance,” who incited the slaughter of firstborn sons; and powerful women, including the Queen of Sheba (“very beautiful and probably a witch”), Jezebel, and the “prophetess” Miriam, Moses’ sister. Raging throughout is Yahweh, a vengeful God who demands unquestioned obedience to his commandments. “Yahweh was a god who wanted to defeat other gods,” Calasso writes. “I am a jealous God,” Yahweh proclaims, “who punishes the children for the sins of their fathers, as far as the third and fourth generations.” Conflicts seemed endless: During the reigns of Saul and David, “war was constant, war without and war within.” Terse exchanges between David and Yahweh were, above all, “military decisions.” David’s 40-year reign was “harrowing and glorious,” marked by recurring battles with the Philistines. Calasso makes palpable schisms and rivalries, persecutions and retributions, holocausts and sacrifices as tribal groups battled one another to form “a single entity”—the people of Israel.
An erudite guide to the biblical world.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-60189-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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