A brief, satisfying introduction to an ancient civilization not unlike our own but largely forgotten and in an area still...
An amateur historian describes ancient Mesopotamia’s early civilization.
In this revised work (originally published in 2012 as Dawn and Sunset: Insight Into the Mystery of the Early Mesopotamian Civilization), Baizerman, a high school English teacher in Israel, provides a primer on ancient Mesopotamia, one of the first complex societies. He illustrates everyday Sumerian life reaching back to the fourth millennium B.C.E. For its citizens to survive, the harsh landscape demanded organization, which led to massive irrigation projects that brought about farming and, eventually, surpluses—the springboard from a nomadic way of life to civilization. Urbanization afforded leisure time that supported art, architecture, festivals, and bureaucracy as well as beer, which the Sumerians were brewing thousands of years ago. They even had a beer goddess. Of “heavily clouded” ethnic origins, the Sumerians spoke a language like no other. Mainly for accounting purposes, they developed writing, advancing from pictograms to cuneiform inscriptions in clay tablets. Baizerman chronicles the growth of metallurgy and industry along with advances in trade, transport, and urban development, such as wheeled vehicles and ceramic water pipes. A theocratic regime gave way to a secular leadership based on warrior skills, while shrewd politics, such as debt forgiveness for the poor, helped forestall riots and revolutions. Even so, the population occasionally revolted against taxes and bureaucracy, and a succession of rulers engaged in military adventures and empire-building. Baizerman outlines the growth of empire and its eventual collapse, noting that “each society carries in its midst a virus of self-destruction.” Mining translations and texts mostly from Internet sources, he provides a vivid impression of what life must have been like in this vanished world to which modern life finds many similarities—constant wars and empire-building, class divisions, taxes, bureaucracy, corruption, political plotting, even climate change. Despite some occasional writing flubs—“For Ancient Mesopotamians, history was a fascinating game, no matter real or made up”—and mixed metaphors, the writing is usually fluid, sometimes even elegant, as with his description of the season cycle: “The earth would repose, regaining its productivity and dreaming of the next flooding.” Elsewhere, he refers to native slaves from families “caught in a mousetrap of debt.” An admirably skeptical researcher, he analyzes his sources and backs up his history with ample footnotes and a bibliography.
A brief, satisfying introduction to an ancient civilization not unlike our own but largely forgotten and in an area still riven with conflict.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-1504936101
Page Count: 288
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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