A deft, engaging portrait of a teeming, shape-shifting city.
A vigorous tour of Jerusalem in all its complexity.
In the three monotheist traditions, Jerusalem is a dreamlike place “of heavenly perfection, our city of joy”; it is also a distinctly physical entity that has endured enormous fracturing over the centuries. BBC journalist and travel writer Teller describes the lives of many of the city’s inhabitants as he attempts to reveal its contemporary essence. He ably investigates a crucial dichotomy: the “physical Jerusalem and [the] moral, spiritual one; an old, corrupted message and a new, clear one.” For ages, he writes, “it didn’t matter that the city had no river, no strategic value and no natural sources of commercial wealth. It had God.” Though accepted as the way it has always been, the division of the city into four quarters—Christian, Muslim, Armenian, and Jewish—actually occurred fairly arbitrarily in the mid-19th century thanks to British Protestant missionaries. Moving back and forth in time, Teller uses as a frame of reference the sequence of walls and gates implemented by Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century, taking readers through the labyrinthine neighborhoods that have grown up around those gates. The author chronicles his in-depth conversations with a wide, diverse swath of the population: Sufi mystics and religious figures of all kinds, of course, but also Palestinian, Indian, African, and Jewish shopkeepers; members of the Dom community (“socially, politically and economically these people are at the bottom of every heap”); and even “quadrilingual” Armenian rock star Apo Sahagian, who grew up in the Old City. Since the Six-Day War of 1967, citizen displacement has been widespread, and while Teller doesn’t delve deeply into this animus, the epilogue explores Palestinian restrictions and the toll of Partition. Overall, the author delivers an illuminating reexamination of an enduring city, a book that makes a satisfying complement to Andrew Lawler’s Under Jerusalem.
A deft, engaging portrait of a teeming, shape-shifting city.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63542-334-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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