A well-researched if incomplete history of Western civilization since the Roman Empire.
Vijg, a geneticist, explores the history of the Western World in this sweeping nonfiction work.
Given the rise of global capitalism centered around technological advances in transportation and communication (in addition to a 500-year history of colonialism), the author asserts that “The West truly reshaped the world in its image.” Europeans historically used pseudoscientific racist ideology, jingoistic ideas of inherent superiority, and religious authority to justify colonialism; Vijg is careful to emphasize that their dominance “had nothing to do with being naturally smart or having a superior culture.” Per the book’s intriguing thesis, Europe’s rise to global power can be boiled down to a single, if multilayered, factor: “luck.” The continent was naturally blessed with a temperate climate and abundant waterways, and its history since the Roman Empire was unique in that it remained politically fragmented throughout the medieval era. The author posits that this fragmentation into a myriad of fiefdoms combined with Christianity to foster a cultural drift toward individualism, reason, and equality under the law. Divided into two parts, the book begins with an exploration of how Europe’s roots as a fringe outpost of the Roman Empire laid the foundations for its future success. The second part explores the snowballing effects of Enlightenment-era technology on shaping European economics and militaries, empowering the region for world domination. Noting that European industrialization was “a fluke of history,” the book concludes with a philosophical rumination on how humanity today can take the best elements of this Western inheritance (technology and democracy, for instance) to forge a new “benevolent world civilization.” Vijg, a professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, backs his work with an impressive body of scholarly footnotes, though academic historians may question the book’s overdrawn, teleological conclusions about Western dominance that often ignore the ways in which non-Western civilizations contributed to Western ideas. The book should be applauded, however, for its careful avoidance of stereotypical tropes of innate European superiority.
A well-researched if incomplete history of Western civilization since the Roman Empire.Pub Date: April 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781036401924
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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