Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes, and Empires (2018) by Tim Mackintosh-Smith5/22/2021
Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The hourglass that swallows you” or "I am done with digging" Whereas other history books I’ve read focus on Islamic history, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes, and Empires (2019) by Tim Mackintosh-Smith details Arabs and their history and culture. The book of course has lots on Mohammed and his successors and their initial great wave of expansion and early division and dynasties and declining periods and reawakening periods and modern situation, but it interestingly starts the history of Arabs 1000 years or so before Mohammed. “When we do take that longer, wider view, we find that Islam was not something that shot up suddenly in Mecca. It is a vast slow growth whose roots lie deep in time and all over the Peninsula, particularly in its South, where they cultivated by a people who did not even call themselves Arabs.” And Mackintosh-Smith’s book is illuminating and entertaining. I learned many things from it, like the following: --Arabs had no identity as Arabs until outside imperial forces (e.g., Rome and Persia) started meddling and exploiting and being manipulated by them etc. --The Arabs’ unique combination of the camel (to carry supplies) and the horse (to charge into battle) led their nomads to become formidable mercenaries and then power brokers and then power breakers. --Arabs tend to value rhetorical truth more highly than empirical truth, the way one says things (especially in high Arabic) being more important than what one says, with great Arabic leaders usually being eloquent (“swordsmen and wordsmen”), for words were and still are seen as cultural products and defensive walls and tools of war. --The great glue holding Arabs together in their fractious identity—along with the Koran and Islam—has been high Arabic language (fusa, or pure milk). --Arabic did not originally show vowels and has no capital letters, and due to its cursive calligraphy was very difficult to print with moveable type, which limited and slowed Arabic development during the time of the western Renaissance. --One vital Arabic quality (linguistic and cultural) is a dualistic yin-yang ethos, which manifests in the fluid interaction between nomad and settled (Bedouin and citified, tribes and peoples, raiders and traders, etc.) and in the many cases in Arabic of the same words being used for opposite (or very different) things like black and white, big and small, unity and division, tradition and modern, collection/union and disunion/division, voice and vote, master and dependent, martyrdom and school certificate, bad regime and order. Mackintosh-Smith provides other interesting etymological features of Arabic, like the same word meaning herd and citizens, or the word for politics deriving from the word for the management and training of camels and horses. He also points out that Arabic is a language of many synonyms: eighty synonyms for honey, two hundred for beard, five hundred for lion, eight hundred for sword, and at least a thousand for camel. (Arabists say that every word in Arabic has at least three meanings: itself, its opposite, and a camel!) Indeed, Mackintosh-Smith really likes language in general and Arabic in particular, and brings it all vividly to life as he tells the history of the Arab people, whether in his translations of Arabic texts (poems, sermons, speeches, letters, books, etc.) or in his own prose, for he often coins nifty words (e.g., demonarchs, anarcharchs, and tyrannosaurs/tyrants) and turns a fine phrase, like the following: --“In my first book, I wrote that in Yemen I felt like both the guest at the feast and the fly on the wall. Nowadays, I feel more like the skeleton at the feast and the fly in the soup… Seeing the land I live in and love falling apart is like watching an old and dear friend losing his mind and committing slow, considered suicide.” --“Like so many revolutions, Mohammed's included, it was begun by those who are hungry for justice but was hijacked by those who are hungry for power.” --“Meaning was mummified.” --“No checks and balances, only checkbooks and bank balances, held ultimately by one man, but if nothing else, the system has the imprimatur of long usage.” --“A strange dark symbiosis, the continual presence of an aggressive Israel, behaving with grotesque injustice towards the people of the territories it occupies in the face of international law, merely prolongs the life of Tyrannosaurus Rex Arabicus, also aggressive, also unjust towards his own countrymen.” One interesting, at times devastating feature of the book is the way that Mackintosh-Smith—who’s lived in Yemen for decades—links the past to the present, often saying things like, “Outside my window now, poets are persuading fourteen-year-old boys to blow themselves up while killing other Arabs.” Ralph Lister reads the book with gusto. Because I don’t know Arabic, I can’t vouch for the accuracy of his pronunciation of the many Arabic words, phrases, and names, but it all sounds exotic and consistent. However, Lister sometimes swallows or quickens (English) words or syllables at the ends of sentences or phrases, such that I sometimes miss the last word in such a case. Otherwise, he's a good reader with an appealing quality to his voice. Readers interested in Arabs, Arabic, and Islam in relation to other cultures and religions in the past and present should find much to learn and think about with this book. View all my reviews
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The Magicians by Lev Grossman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Vivid, Edgy Urban Portal Fantasy about Portal Fantasy Quentin Coldwater, seventeen, is an unhappy, cocky, competitive nerd who excels at passing tests. Although he hasn’t grown out of a childhood obsession with a Narnia-esque five-book fantasy series about visiting a world called Fillory, and his hobby is doing slight-of-hand magic tricks, Quentin can’t believe in magic. On this winter day in Brooklyn, he goes to his Princeton admissions interview only to find that the interviewer has just died. The paramedic hands Quentin an envelope that was supposedly left for him, sending him through an overgrown abandoned lot and into summer at Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. He’s given an entrance examination consisting of normal mathematical problems as well as requests to translate Shakespeare into an imaginary language and to draw a rabbit that starts running around the test book eating other questions. When the Dean tells him to do some real magic—not sleight-of-hand tricks—a confused Quentin unconsciously recites something in his made-up language and tosses a deck of cards that assemble into a card house replicating Brakebills’ architecture. Thus begins Quentin’s magical education at Brakebills, the first and longest section of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (2009). Whereas J. K. Rowling draws out Harry Potter’s education at Hogwarts over seven novels, one for each year of Harry’s life, however, Grossman condenses Quentin’s five-year course of study (taking about four years because he skips one year) into about half of his novel. This telescoping still leaves plenty of opportunities to describe and explain magic, which requires natural aptitude, strong will, anger matched with restraint, and intense study and practice, including multiple languages, different “disciplines” of magic, complicated finger and hand gestures, and care for the circumstances around any spell. There is at least one college for magic on every major continent, and more than a few magicians passing as normal people: like Harry Potter, The Magicians requires a Herculean suspension of disbelief that nearly no one in our world would notice the magic going on around them. Not that Brakebills is Hogwarts and The Magicians a Harry Potter book! The pupils here are college students, the female characters are more compelling, the writing more sophisticated, the action spicier--smoking, drinking, swearing, snarking, drugs, and sex--and the psychology and the conflict much less black and white. There are no cartoonishly awful characters ala the Dursleys or Draco Malfoy and his minions. There is a strong homosexual supporting character (though Grossman imagines few people of color, leaving the book quite white). Quentin is often an unlikeable protagonist, being self-centered and causing harm to others, but his growth through suffering and guilt is well done and humanizing. Above all, about half-way through the novel, the characters and story graduate from the Hogwarts model of magical school education and begin a critical but affectionate and imaginative parody of The Chronicles of Narnia. The graphic violence and Big Brother-like ram gods of the portal world Fillory may make squeamish readers and Aslan lovers squirm. My favorite part of the book is Grossman’s celebration, deconstruction, and complication of Narnia. Grossman uses the omnipresent Fillory to explore the different ways in which children read such fantasy stories as children and remember and reread them as adults, to demonstrate the nearly overwhelming desire we have (especially but not only as children) for escape and adventure in fantasy worlds, and to make the fantasy (magic, etc.) of his own narrative world feel more real. Grossman’s writing is usually good to read, whether profane dialogue (“Wake up!” Alice said. “This isn't a story! It's just one fucking thing after another! Somebody could have died back there!”) or uncanny fantastic happenings or beings: “It was surreal. She was almost certainly dead. The woman's hair was dark and wet and thick with clumped ice. Her eyes--she appeared to be looking right at them--were midnight blue and didn't move or blink, and her skin was a pale pearlescent gray. Her shoulders were bare. She looked sixteen at most. Her eyelashes were clotted with frost.” There are vivid descriptions of what it feels like to do magic: “. . . streams of fat white sparks streamed out of his fingertips. It was amazing--it was like they had been inside him all his life, just waiting for him to wave his hands the right way. They splashed happily out across the ceiling in the dimness and came floating festively down around him, bouncing a few times when they hit the floor and then finally winking out. His hands felt warm and tingly.” There are impressive scenes that transcend genre, parody, pastiche, or whatever, like when Quentin encounters the Beast during a lecture, runs naked to the south pole, or first visits the Neitherlands. Grossman’s student characters speak American slang: “Dude,” “I'm freezing my tits off,” “You fucking fucked him,” etc. He makes funny and apt similes from our world’s popular culture, like Scooby-Doo, an anti-pollution commercial from the 1960s, and Andy Warhol. He inserts pop culture refs here and there, as when the students sing “Heart and Soul,” mock the wands of Harry Potter, do a “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” dance, or imagine a porn mag for trees called Enthouse. (Strangely, despite the pervasive influence of Narnia via Fillory--e.g., seemingly benevolent god and wicked witch, different time scales, inevitable ejection from the fantasy world, human siblings who become kings and queens, world between the worlds, etc.--the characters never mention C. S. Lewis’ books!) I enjoyed The Magicians and look forward to reading the next two books in the trilogy. People who like Harry Potter and Narnia but want something edgier and more ambiguous for older readers should like this one. View all my reviews
American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West by Nate Blakeslee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Absorbing, Illuminating, Devastating American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West (2017) by Nate Blakeslee begins in December 2012 with Wyoming hunter “Steven Turnbull” (not his real name) about to shoot a magnificent gray wolf or her big black mate. Blakeslee reveals the mindset of such a hunter, who blames the 1995 reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park for the decrease in the elk he loves to hunt, possesses a license to kill a wolf, uses a dying rabbit call to summon predators, and is generally a capable, efficient, law-abiding guy who loves hunting (and who supported Obama Care so he could finally get health care). Blakeslee’s book then goes on to relate how wolves were returned after nearly seventy years to Yellowstone, to set forth the controversy surrounding it (anti-wolf hunters and ranchers vs. pro-wolf biologists and wolf-watchers, with state and federal governments in between), and best of all to describe the seasonal and daily lives of the wolves of Yellowstone, focusing on a few “star” packs and individuals, especially the capable, charismatic, intelligent alpha-female 0-Six. We learn much about gray wolves, their physical attributes, their personalities, their hunting, their howling (warning, communicating, threatening, morale raising, celebrating, mourning, bonding, etc.), as well as their mate-finding, pup-raising, pack-making, turf warring, environment enriching, and history in the US. We also learn about the obsessions of people who love wolves and of people who hate them. Although Blakeslee refrains from demonizing (or even really criticizing) wolf hunters, his heart is in the wolf camp, and he spends most time with figures like the Park’s interpretive ranger Rick Macintyre (an “ironman” wolf watcher who for over a decade rarely missed a day in the park watching wolves and then writing meticulous notes about his observations) and his friends. The stories they tell of 0-Six and her forbears and pack-mates and rivals are riveting and moving and express how individual and collective wolves are, how adaptive and intelligent, how perfectly suited to a wild environment, and finally, yes, how they must feel joy and grief. The Epilogue (read by Blakeslee) picks up where the prologue left off and depicts the aftermath of the killing of the most famous wolf in Yellowstone (and in the world). The book gives us a glimpse of what it must be like to watch these beautiful and formidable creatures in nature and to come to love them as individuals and then to mourn them when they die, whether from natural causes in their environments or, especially painfully, when they are killed by hunters. It is thus at times a devastating book, especially the last chapters, but also the parts detailing the politics behind wolf policy, such that, for example, the democrats’ desire to hold onto the senate in the 2012 elections led to a sneaky rider being inserted into a vital budget bill that enabled wolves to be hunted at the discretion of certain states, the matter boiling down to protecting Obama Care or wolves. Blakeslee also explores how wolf policy at the state level and even at the federal level tends to ignore inconvenient science and is often guided by emotion, namely hatred for or envy of the super predators. Reading the book made me hate hunting even more than I already did, but also made me hate hunters less, because Blakeslee does present their human situations and world views. The book of course increased my already big love for wolves (a high point of my life was seeing wolves playing and howling in a sudden summer snow in Denali National Park). I suspect that people who hate wolves will not be able to read this book; but they should know that it does not shrilly condemn them. Rather, it celebrates the intelligence and beauty and fierceness and playfulness and loyalty of wolves, and the wonder and mortality of life and the natural world. The audiobook is well read by Mark Bramhall and closes with fifteen seconds of uncanny and beautiful howling that raised bumps on my skin and brought tears to my eyes (I would have liked it to go on much longer and wished I could hear it in person). View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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