by Stewart Gordon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2007
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
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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