A fine historian fills in a major historical blank space.
An expert account of a historical rivalry long neglected by popular historians.
In his latest lucid work of ancient history, veteran British historian Goldsworthy, author of Pax Romana, How Rome Fell, and other notable books, tells “the story of ancient Rome and its rivalry with the Parthian and Sasanian Persian dynasties that presided over an empire with its heartland in modern Iran. Nowhere else did the Romans share a border with a state anywhere near as large and sophisticated for such a long period of time.” Although larger and stronger, Rome never conquered its eastern rival as it had Carthage, and alongside many victories were humiliating defeats. Mostly, however, there was peaceful coexistence. Of course, peaceful coexistence interested ancient scholars far less than war and politics. Goldsworthy works hard to describe the culture, religion, and economic life of ancient Persia, but readers will encounter a steady stream of military campaigns and bloody battles, and many will struggle to remember the names of innumerable kings, would-be kings, and details of dynastic quarrels. A war in the early seventh century ended with Persia’s king ruling over more territory than any of his predecessors, but around the year 630, armies of the Prophet Muhammad emerged from Arabia and conquered it in little more than a decade. Readers will appreciate Goldsworthy’s accessible prose and critical eye but quickly realize that almost everything is told from Rome’s point of view. The author rightly explains that this is unavoidable because Romans (Plutarch, Suetonius, Livy, and others) produced almost all the surviving histories. They were not impartial, but “the peoples who fought against the Romans left no accounts at all.” Scattered cuneiform tablets, pottery, rock inscriptions, and coins provide most of the contemporary evidence, with most histories from the Persian perspective written much later during the Muslim dynasties. Nonetheless, Goldsworthy produces yet another illuminating study.
A fine historian fills in a major historical blank space.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781541619968
Page Count: 608
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
HISTORY | ANCIENT | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
An erudite guide to the biblical world.
Revelations from the Old Testament.
“The Bible has no rivals when it comes to the art of omission, of not saying what everyone would like to know,” observes Calasso (1941-2021), the acclaimed Italian publisher, translator, and explorer of myth, gods, and sacred ritual. In this probing inquiry into biblical mysteries, the author meditates on the complexities and contradictions of key events and figures. He examines the “enigmatic nature” of original sin in Genesis, an anomaly occurring in no other creation myth; God’s mandate of circumcision for all Jewish men; and theomorphism in the form of Adam: a man created in the image of the god who made him. Among the individuals Calasso attends to in an abundantly populated volume are Saul, the first king of Israel; the handsome shepherd David, his successor; David’s son Solomon, whose relatively peaceful reign allowed him “to look at the world and study it”; Moses, steeped in “law and vengeance,” who incited the slaughter of firstborn sons; and powerful women, including the Queen of Sheba (“very beautiful and probably a witch”), Jezebel, and the “prophetess” Miriam, Moses’ sister. Raging throughout is Yahweh, a vengeful God who demands unquestioned obedience to his commandments. “Yahweh was a god who wanted to defeat other gods,” Calasso writes. “I am a jealous God,” Yahweh proclaims, “who punishes the children for the sins of their fathers, as far as the third and fourth generations.” Conflicts seemed endless: During the reigns of Saul and David, “war was constant, war without and war within.” Terse exchanges between David and Yahweh were, above all, “military decisions.” David’s 40-year reign was “harrowing and glorious,” marked by recurring battles with the Philistines. Calasso makes palpable schisms and rivalries, persecutions and retributions, holocausts and sacrifices as tribal groups battled one another to form “a single entity”—the people of Israel.
An erudite guide to the biblical world.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-60189-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
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