An engaging history of the Arab world by a Yemen-based Westerner thoroughly versed in Arabic.
One clarifying theme runs throughout this extensive, illuminating narrative of the Arab people from ancient to modern times: language. Long before the writing of the Quran, the language that “evolved on the tongues of tribal soothsayers and poets…has long, perhaps always, been the catalyst of a larger Arab identity.” Arabist and translator Mackintosh-Smith (Yemen: The Unknown Arabia, 2014, etc.), a senior fellow at the Library of Arabic Literature who has lived in the Arab world for 35 years, structures his study around “three waves of unity” in Arab history that originated from the “momentum of ’arabbiyyah, the high language par excellence.” These included the slow, ancient tribal agitation of self-awareness; the “tsunami” of conquest inspired by Muhammad’s Quranic recitations; and the 19th-century nationalism awakened by Napoleon’s conquest. “That last wave,” writes the author, “is still breaking now.” Throughout this impressive book, Mackintosh-Smith grapples with coexisting “rationalities” of Arab history: the “settled” society, or the civil polity where people lived together in a town; and the Bedouin or nomadic tradition. The rugged, dry terrain and lack of fresh water kept the people of the Arabian subcontinent in perpetual mobility (another theme) and imparted the masterful pairing of two beasts of burden—the camel and horse—that enabled the Arabs’ transformation from “plodding hauliers into dashing warriors.” The author demonstrates the power of rhetoric by the orator-leaders who “gathered the word”—of the people, recorded battles, etc.—even before Muhammad channeled that energy in disciplined Quranic teaching and embarked on his state-building years in Medina. Over the course of an extensive, consistently fascinating history, Mackintosh-Smith expertly picks and chooses his details and analyses, providing an admirably complete picture of a consistently misunderstood part of world history and culture. In addition to illustrations and maps, the author includes a useful chronology delineating both “events” and elements of “language, culture, society, identity.”
A marvelous journey brimming with adventure and poetry and narrated by a keen, compassionate observer.Pub Date: May 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-300-18028-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | WORLD | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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