The Mongol Storm is a straightforward narrative of the first century of Mongol conquest (c. 1220-1320) with an especial focus on its impact in the MidThe Mongol Storm is a straightforward narrative of the first century of Mongol conquest (c. 1220-1320) with an especial focus on its impact in the Middle East, Egypt and Anatolia (including the Crusader States). As someone fascinated by this era, I found it interesting and would recommend it to the general reader....more
"The Scythians, a nomadic herding people from the steppes, spread their complex and highly innovative culture into the peripheral Eurasian world of la
"The Scythians, a nomadic herding people from the steppes, spread their complex and highly innovative culture into the peripheral Eurasian world of late Archaic Antiquity by directly ruling over parts of it. Its introduction to Southeastern Europe, the Near East, South Asia, and East Asia at the same time and in the same ways effectively produced the great shared cultural flowering known as the Classical Age." (p. 267 this edition)
The Scythian Empire is the best nonfiction I've read so far this year. It's a provocative argument that throws the history of the ancient Middle East, Greece and China into an entirely new perspective, as hinted in the final paragraph of the main text quoted above. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the period without hesitation (I'm set on acquiring my own copy of the work).
One caveat, it's not written with a general reader in mind, and beyond that Beckwith has a tendency to constantly repeat certain phrases and information to excess. On the other hand, the Endnotes are practically a book unto themselves (and that's a positive from my point of view) and the appendix "Zoroaster and Monotheism" is a revelatory perspective on the origins of monotheism....more
The Indus is part of Reaktion Book’s Lost Civilizations series and as such is a nicely concise overview of the current state of Indus civilization stuThe Indus is part of Reaktion Book’s Lost Civilizations series and as such is a nicely concise overview of the current state of Indus civilization studies (as of 2016 in this edition). The civilization that arose around the Indus and Saraswati rivers flourished from about 3500 BCE to 1800 BCE, give or take a few centuries; Harappa, its 2nd largest urban center, lasted to about 1300 before disappearing from the archaeological record. Indus-related sites, however, have been found dating to 7000 BCE.
However, it remains the least understood of the great urban civilizations, and what we do know of it suggests a political, economic and social culture quite different from the contemporaneous Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations. A civilization quite advanced (their sewage systems and urban planning were unmatched in the ancient world until the Roman era) but one that doesn’t appear to have had a stark social or economic hierarchy or that was particularly warlike. If the Indus valley peoples lacked any technology it would have been that for making war. Their urban centers had no (obvious) defensive characteristics like walls or fortified citadels and their weapons were primitive compared to those of Sumerian or Egyptian armies.
Their past remains enigmatic primarily for two reasons – it’s difficult to excavate their sites (both for geological and political reasons) and we haven’t deciphered their script.
Recommended. Obviously, you’re not going to get much detail but Robinson provides a bibliography & his writing is clear and straightforward. Exactly what you want in a book like this....more
The blurb on the dust jacket of my edition says that Vietnam At War is “a penetrating history of how the Vietnamese people experienced the wars for thThe blurb on the dust jacket of my edition says that Vietnam At War is “a penetrating history of how the Vietnamese people experienced the wars for their country” and “Mark Philip Bradley paints a vivid picture of how Vietnamese people of all classes…came to understand the thirty years of bloody warfare that unfolded around them.” It was comments like these and favorable reviews of this book that got it on my GR wishlist and convinced me to acquire it when given opportunity. Unfortunately, that’s not what I got with this book. It’s a perfectly adequate primer on the war in Vietnam (from the French attempt to recolonize the region after 1945 to Saigon’s fall in 1975) but it’s hardly a “penetrating” look at how the Vietnamese experienced the wars; it’s hardly a look at all.
One problem is that the book’s too short. At 196 pages of text in my edition, it wastes too many of them setting the background and not nearly enough talking about the Vietnamese. We meet some individuals: Dang Thuy Tram, a young Northern medical student who worked in a field hospital from 1967 to 1970, when she was killed; the writers Tran Huy Quang and Bao Ninh; Trinh Công Son, a musician; and Dang Nhat Minh, a film-maker. But Bradley barely mentions them and their lives before returning to the straight-up narrative.
This was not the book I expected or hoped for. At the end of the day, I expected to know more about both how the Vietnamese responded intellectually to the wars and how individuals lived through it. I’m sure – if I could read Vietnamese – that I would find a wealth of sources to satisfy my curiosity but lacking that skill I found Bradley’s slim volume a not-very-credible attempt to convey that information to an English-reading audience. (The best parts of the book are the “Introduction” and “Coda,” where the individuals mentioned above are most visible, because they show the kind of book that Bradley could have/should have written.)
Another complaint I have is that the photographs included don’t seem to be very well organized and there are too few....more
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