Reviews

Karen Armstrong

Anchor Books (Random House), ISBN: 0385721404  Publisher, Buy online

British theologian Karen Armstrong entered a convent at seventeen to become a Catholic nun. She defrocked in 1969 (this caused a great scandal among British Catholics, many have not forgiven her to this day). She has since become a student of the three great monotheistic religions, writing one bestseller on the subject, A History of God

In this book, she recounts the history of the Crusades and how it still shapes the modern-day Middle East. Interestingly, she tries to take a tripartite Christian/Jewish/Muslim view (more accurately, a quadripartite Catholic/Greek Orthodox/Jewish/Muslim view, but she herself writes about a “triple vision”). Most other accounts give short shrift to the Jewish point of view.

Even now, the subject is still fraught with passion and having an entirely unbiased view is difficult, but she does a good job of it in my opinion. Certainly, her assessment is quite critical of the Crusaders, but the only actors to which she is wholly sympathetic are the humanistic Byzantines, who were poorly repaid for their forbearance towards the Crusaders by the sack of Constantinople.

Her central thesis is that the Crusades were the crucible where the modern European identity was forged, and that unfortunately in the process it was alloyed with anti-semitism and a visceral hostility towards Islam. Her second thesis, somewhat less convincing, is that in the current Israeli-Arab conflict, both parties are consciously replaying the Crusades.

The convoluted politics of the Middle East, over seven millennia in the making, have a habit of tripping up overly simplistic analyses. The Lebanese master story-teller Amin Maalouf, in his excellent (but clearly not unbiased) The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, notes that shortly after the first crusade, an army of Christian and Muslim allies fought another such army in Syria.

The Crusades were clearly seen at first as a colonial or purely military venture by Arabs of all faiths, it is only later with the sultans Nasr-ud-din and Salah-ud-din (Saladin) that the war took on a religious significance. While Karen Armstrong does a good job of showing how the conflict progressively acquired the traits of a holy war, she is not as good at identifying the purely secular realpolitik that was pursued then as it is today.

All in all, for all its flaws, specially in the political analysis of the current situation, this is an excellent and thought-provoking book. Highly recommended.

Galen Rowell

Sierra Club, ISBN: 0871563673 Publisher, Buy online

Galen Rowell was a world-class mountaineer and photographer. He passed away with his wife in an airplane crash on August 11, 2002.

He was a master of color landscapes and had the knack of catching unique combinations of light in the memorable photos that can be seen in his Mountain Light Gallery. Interestingly, he eschewed the large format cameras used by Ansel Adams and used exclusively 35mm cameras from Nikon (thus thoroughly debunking the orthodoxy that 35mm cannot be used for serious landscape photography).

In this book, Rowell lays out his relation to mountains, his artistic vision and his photographic techniques, in an engaging and lively style alternating between theoretical text and more illustrative intermezzos with detailed descriptions of the story behind each image (reminiscent of Ansel Adams’ Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs. Like Ansel Adams, he was a member of the Sierra Club, but ecological preoccupations are woven subtly in the text. He shows a photo taken near a 4900 year old bristlecone pine that was felled by a botanist who couldn’t be troubled to special-order a core sampling borer from Switzerland.

The photos in the book are gorgeous, but this is no mere coffee-table book (it is too affordable to be one, for starters). All in all, I believe this book is a must-read for anyone interested in landscape photography, even if you are not into the strenuous physical style he favored.

In his A History of Eternity, Borges rightfully attacked Richard Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights as being sensationalist and emphasizing the savage and brutal (not to mention sensual) nature of the Orient to pander to his thrill-seeking British audience.

One of the great virtues of Burton’s text, however, is the wealth of footnotes he supplies. Many are very witty, and collected, they are sometimes more interesting than the original text itself.

A case in point, this footnote on the colloquial word for “police”: “Arab. Al-Zalamah lit. = tyrants, oppressors, applied to the police and generally to employés of Government. It is a word which tells a history”. It seems little has changed since…

The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown

NESFA (New England SF Association), ISBN: 1886778183 Publisher, Buy online

Fredric Brown is arguably the finest writer of science-fiction short stories ever, just as Jorge Luis Borges is the master of the metaphysical fantastic stories.

Curiously, his SF work is more easily available abroad, notably the French translations by Denoël, than in his native US, and most of his books still in print are his mystery novels. This is why I applaud the NESFA’s decision to collect and reprint all the short stories.

Many of these are masterpieces of the genre, with surprising endings that pack a wallop. If you like the TV series “The Twilight Zone”, you know what I mean. Many of them are technically not SF, like the bawdy “The ring of Hans Carvel” in which a medieval man sells his soul for a way to keep his young wife faithful, but they are all extremely enjoyable.

For fans of Ansel Adams, the Library of Congress has an online exhibit based on his book “Born Free and Equal”. This book is a series of photographs taken at the Manzanar camp in California where Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II.

A book version has been reprinted.

Update (2002-09-16): This article in The Atlantic sheds some light on the background for the original exhibition.