Appropriately epic and consistently erudite, yet accessible for lay readers.
A vibrant biography of the holy book of Islam.
Islamic scholar Jebara, author of Muhammad, the World-Changer, presents a well-researched, manageable study of the vastness that is the Qur’an. In many ways, the book works as a threefold history—of a book, a man, and a religion—as the author capably intertwines the stories of the Qur’an, Muhammad, and the Muslim religion in general. Jebara approaches the Qur’an as a true subject for biography, no less so than its prophet. “The Qur’an,” he writes, “was not a book per se or any other kind of physical object, but rather an unfolding experience—its own unique category of living being.” This living Qur’an both slumbers and cries out, and the author takes special care to identify the Qur’an’s silences: periods of weeks or months during which no revelations occurred, followed by short bursts of verbiage or lengthy outpourings. For Jebara, the living Qur’an’s voice also changes and adapts to new situations. “No longer soothing pain or addressing doubts, the Qur’an spoke in the voice of a praising mentor,” he writes at one point. Throughout, Jebara shows how the Qur’an is more than a static sacred text. It is a lively entity with personality and agency, and one only fully understood in its historical context. The author delves into such diverse topics as linguistics and the Jewish diaspora in the Middle East to set the stage for readers’ historical journey. Finally, Jebara reflects on the Qur’an’s place in modern Islam. “The words of the Qur’an are omnipresent—yet its spirit lies dormant,” he writes. Despite the challenges this sacred text faces in modern society, Jebara is optimistic: “The critics…have it backward: The Qur’an is not the source of the Muslim world’s problems, but its untapped solution.”
Appropriately epic and consistently erudite, yet accessible for lay readers.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781250282361
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's Essentials
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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