Fidler provides a palpable sense of this glittering city built as “a mirror of heaven.”
A history/travel guide about the fabled eastern capital of the Romans.
Between Constantinople’s founding in 330 to its final siege by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, there were nearly 100 Roman emperors (and several empresses) and a flourishing Roman, Greek, and Christian culture that defied the so-called Dark Ages of Western Europe. In this entertaining survey, Fidler, the host of a popular radio program in Australia, recounts this history through the lens of a recent trip with his 14-year-old son to Istanbul. Alternating between scholarship and travelogue, taking the form of a gentle lecture for the curious, sometimes-skeptical son, the narrative presents a palatable, nondidactic history lesson, providing a sense of how the Turkish culture reigns in the present. While scholars refer to this early era of the city as Byzantium, its inhabitants considered themselves proudly Roman, inheritors of the great, sprawling civilization of Augustus, with Latin as their language until Greek became the lingua franca after the rule of Justinian. While Rome was being sacked by the Visigoths, the eastern capital of Constantinople—two-thirds of which is surrounded by water, thus enjoying an incomparable strategic advantage—was constructing the great Theodosian Walls around its one land direction, just before Attila the Hun could attack in 447. Indeed, the Muslims trained their conquering eyes on the city numerous times until the eventual conquest by Mehmed II. The author navigates fluidly from the city’s founding by Constantine, the first Christian ruler, moving on to the significant rule of Justinian—who commissioned his famous Codex from Roman law, still pertinent in European civil law today—and his strong-willed wife, Theodora, and the construction of the Hagia Sophia. He also covers the schisms, plagues, Crusades, sieges, and the creation of the “deep state” that resonates today under Turkey’s current authoritarian prime minister.
Fidler provides a palpable sense of this glittering city built as “a mirror of heaven.”Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-511-1
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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
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