Pared-down, brief vignettes provide an intimate complement to David Levering Lewis’s God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of...
Documents written by men who lived, worked and traveled to Asia between 500 and 1500 CE portray thriving trading centers from Arabia to China.
Gordon (Center for South Asian Studies/Univ. of Michigan) synthesizes elaborate detail from these eight memoirs to convey their historical pertinence to the lay reader. Each of the travelers came into contact with diverse people and made startling cultural discoveries. The Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang roamed from the Yellow River to Tashkent and eventually into India, writing about his marvelous adventures during the years 618–632 as he connected with religious groups practicing Taoism and Zoroastrianism. Ibn Fadlan was sent from Baghdad to the Bulgar kingdom near the Volga River in 921; his text enables the author to explain the early dissemination of Islam. Through the autobiography of Neoplatonic philosopher Ibn Sina, we glimpse the intellectual network teeming in Baghdad during the period 1020–1036, when the Abbasid dynasty fostered a range of inventions (the zero, algorithm, astrolabe), translations from Greek and Latin, philosophical inquiry and the use of paper. The travels of Jewish spice trader Abraham bin Yiju between Mangalore, India and Cairo from 1120 to 1160 reveal the period’s trust-based business model and the extensive range of trade routes. Imperial Muslim diplomat Ibn Battuta’s 14th-century memoir demonstrates that rich questing travelers were the vital mechanism keeping cities like Delhi, Damascus and Mecca in touch. Chinese Muslim Ma Huan’s account of expeditions he joined in 1413 and 1421 provides a rare portrait of the Ming imperial fleets. Babur, head of a Mongol army of the steppe, records the movement of marauding horse-driven tribes from 1494 to 1526. Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires headed the first diplomatic mission to China in 1517, precipitating the clash between white and Asian civilization. All of the narratives reveal the highly connected interplay of commodities and ideas that enriched Asia.
Pared-down, brief vignettes provide an intimate complement to David Levering Lewis’s God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570–1215 (2008).Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-306-81556-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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