This book is a dramatically recounted narrative history of the fall of Constantinople in 1453. I appreciated the way the book provided context includiThis book is a dramatically recounted narrative history of the fall of Constantinople in 1453. I appreciated the way the book provided context including the role of Byzantium, its withering away, the rise of the Ottomans and, at the end, consequences describing the fallout over the years and centuries of the fall of Constantinople. The bulk of the book is military history: how artillery changed siege warfare, how the navy operated at the time, and the most novel and interesting, the dueling war of sappers digging tunnels into Constantinople and counter-sappers trying to deduct those tunnels and destroy them, ideally killing the sappers in the process. It also has a certain amount of political history and context, especially on the Christian side with the role--or lack thereof--of Venice, Genoa, the Pope, and other Christian states. All of which moves along in a brisk and entertaining manner.
Like narrative histories the author often speculates--without being clear that he is doing so--about the mindset of various characters and lends drama wherever he can to an, admittedly, rather dramatic event. At times he seems happy to pass along anything that is too-good-to-check but at other times he is very careful about the sources, applying a discount based on the biases and distance from the event of some of the chroniclers.
The book is well served by the many quotes from contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous accounts that give you a fuller understanding of the perspectives of those involved, although most of this is on the Byzantine side (an author's note states that primary sources from the Ottoman perspective are few and far between).
I also appreciated the the book emphasized the multiculturalism of both sides, did not paper over the brutality, but also understood the role that propaganda has played in some accounts of it.
Overall, highly recommended if this topic interests you--and you want a slice of world history with particularly vivid details about the moment-by-moment events of a few months of military preparations and battle in that history....more
This was a sweeping world history that covers roughly from 500 BC to the present. It puts attempts to put the “center” of Asia (which he sometimes calThis was a sweeping world history that covers roughly from 500 BC to the present. It puts attempts to put the “center” of Asia (which he sometimes calls the center of the world) at the center of the story, with the plurality of this “center” being about Persia but also Turkey, the Arabian peninsula, Afghanistan, the former USSR stans, and a bit of China as well. I say “attempts” because most of the events it covers are the same that a standard history of the world would cover (the Roman Empire, the rise of Christianity, its collapse, the “dark ages”, European discovery and conquest of the Americas, the renaissance, World War I, World War II, etc.) but it covers all of them from a slightly different angle, with the role of or impact on Central Asia being an important part of the story. But rarely does it tell much of the history of Central Asia beyond the way in which it is affected by or affects the more standard histories.
The different angle can be fascinating, from the ways in which Christianity was really defined and developed in the East not the West to a better understanding of the role that places like Crimea and Afghanistan have played in the global game from the 19th century through today.
Overall I quite liked the book and am glad I read it. But I found a number of aspects irritating, all of which are getting more space in this review than is representative of my feeling about the book.
Naturally, I read the last part of the book last so I will dive in there. The conclusion is all about the rise of Central Asia with the assertion, “We are seeing the signs of the world’s centre of gravity shifting—back to where it lay for millennia.” He then treats us to a whirlwind tour of the huge monuments, museums, airport, luxury hotels and mines of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and more. (He includes a dig at economists who he believes have focused insufficiently on these countries and instead been distracted by overstating the importance of emerging markets like Brazil, China, and India.)
This conclusion bizarrely asserts that China’s belt and road is the equivalent of the British Empire (“As late as the middle of the twentieth century, it was possible to sail from Southampton, London or Liverpool to the other side of the world without leaving British territory, putting in at Gibraltar and then Malta before Port Said; from there to Aden, Bombay and Colombo, pausing in the Malay peninsula and finally reaching Hong Kong. Today, it is the Chinese who can do something similar.”). Also that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is the equivalent of the European Union (“Originally set up to facilitate political, economic and military collaboration between Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and China, the Shanghai Co-Operation Organisation (SCO) is becoming increasingly influential and gradually turning into a viable alternative to the European Union.”)
But what was particularly jarring, and I think emblematic of one of the issues with the book, was that after the concluding chapter which stated “New intellectual centres of excellence are also emerging in a region that at one time produced the world’s most outstanding scholars. Campuses have been springing up across the Persian Gulf that have been endowed by local rulers and magnates” the acknowledgments begin with "There is no finer place in the world for a historian to work than Oxford” and go on to also thank the British government archives, Cambridge University and the U.S. National Security Archives—with the only reference to anything global being “travels across Britain, Europe, Asia and Africa have helped refine good ideas, and sometimes prompted bad ones to be discarded.”
This was emblematic of three of the issues I had with the book:
1. It is dripping with contempt for the West (e.g., “Rome had long cast a greedy eye over Egypt”). The loaded, pejorative terms for anything the Romans do, describing its ruthless expropriation with language that is not repeated even in describing the vast conquests of the rise of Islam—which are treated as a benign force for standardizing rules, Ghenghis Khan or any other empire or conquerers that came from Central Asia.
2. Although the book ostensibly is trying to center the history around Central Asia, it often feels as if the author is denying their agency, at least in the last 500 years or so. The Romans, the Europeans, the United States all have agency—they make decisions and execute on them. The Central Asians just react, and anything bad they do is because they were reacting to whatever the West did (e.g., bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Center was not his agency but just his reacting to the way the United States treated him). In that way it really does seem more like the view from Oxford than the view from Baku.
3. The allocation of attention in the history is very unbalanced. The rise of the empires in Central Asia to Alexander in 336 BC gets 3 pages. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars get 19 pages. Not only is that overly chronocentric and US centric, it was also a little disappointing because it meant more pages on something I already knew a lot about it.
Overall I’m glad I read the book. Most of the issues I had with it were about the last quarter of so of the book, although those issues showed through—both as I read and in retrospect—in the earlier parts as well. I would recommend you read it, just not uncriticially....more
A brutal book, sometimes to the point of being repetitive, about the Chinese liberation--the triumph of Mao over the Chiang Kai-shek and the first yeaA brutal book, sometimes to the point of being repetitive, about the Chinese liberation--the triumph of Mao over the Chiang Kai-shek and the first year's of the People's Republic of China including the consolidation of the Communist party's control, land reform, thought reform, and briefly at the end the "hundred flowers bloom" period setting up the Great Leap Forward that is covered in the next volume of the trilogy. The book focuses on the consequences of all of this for the people of China--the ways in which the communists set quotas for killing (which were more often floors than ceilings), their network of concentration camps, how collectivization became serfdom, etc. He argues that while China appeared to progress enormously through 1956 the people themselves were materially much worse off in terms of food, healthcare, living accommodations, etc. Frank Dikötter traces all of this directly to Mao's desire to be more Stalinist than Stalin, documenting the ways in which Mao became worse after Stalin's restraint was gone after 1953.
The Tragedy of Liberation depicts nothing at all redeeming about the communist control of China, all of the violence is directly attributed to the ignorance and vainglory of Mao, with little role for broader political or social developments--beyond a describioption of Mao's love/hate relationship with Stalin and the impact that events in the Eastern Bloc had on China--including Kruschev's secret speech and Hungary's revolt.
This is the first in a trilogy--the next volume covers the Great Leap Forward and associated famine. The last volume covers The Cultural Revolution. I will certainly be reading them....more
The first volume of a black-and-white graphic/manga epic about the Showa era in Japan, the reign of Emperor Hirohito from 1926 to 1989 (although it chThe first volume of a black-and-white graphic/manga epic about the Showa era in Japan, the reign of Emperor Hirohito from 1926 to 1989 (although it cheats and actually begins with the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923). The book alternates between history, largely focused on leadership and military developments, and a memoir of the author's life--who was born in 1922 so almost completely overlaps with the period he is writing about. The history itself is partly shown with highly realistic sometimes photo-like pictures of military scenes alternating with some sort of manga creature explaining what is is going on in the history. These are well balanced against Mizuki's growing up and his childhood games mirroring the events around him or the economic developments affecting his families lives and careers. This volume documents the unofficial war against China with unflinching anti-militarism and ends shortly after the beginning of World War II in Europe. The second volume covers most of World War II and, although I have not read it yet, I assume it reflects an even greater convergence of Mizuki's life and the historical events he is describing as he serves in the Japanese army. All told, both a good history, an interesting memoir and a powerful and humane perspective on an important period of history....more
A harrowing memoir of one person's experience with the Cultural Revolution. It describes a somewhat older professor of Sanskrit who partially joins onA harrowing memoir of one person's experience with the Cultural Revolution. It describes a somewhat older professor of Sanskrit who partially joins one of the factions on campus, in part to protect himself. When the other faction attacks him over it he comes close to committing suicide--with the preparations described in great detail--only to be "saved" at the last moment by being carted off to "prison". And "prison" is in quotes because he was put in a cowshed on the campus of Peking University, subject to constant beating and humiliation, group confession sessions, much of it from his former teachers and colleagues. Eventually he is rehabilitated and gets his job back. All of this is well told, with little bitterness even against the perpetrators (in part because of his own awareness of his imperfections), but a deeper bitterness against the idea that this might all be forgotten....more
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