BARBARIANS: AN ALTERNATIVE ROMAN HISTORY by Terry Jones.

Terry Jones and Alan Ereira, Barbarians: An Alternative Roman History (BBC Books, 2007). A companion to the four-part BBC TV documentary and DVD set, Terry Jones’ Barbarians.

Also available on Nook and Kindle.  

(HISTORY)

Reviewed by Laird Addis

Terry Jones is best known as a member of Monty Python, but he is also an amateur historian, having written four books on medieval England, as well as authoring several children’s books.

History, they say, is written by the victors, and this book is largely concerned to correct the history of the Roman Empire as was written by the Romans and their successors, especially representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, over the centuries since.  It is a highly entertaining (Jones can’t completely forget his Monty Python years) and very instructive account of the interactions of many kinds of the Romans over several centuries (roughly, 200 BCE to 500 CE) with the Celts, the Goths, the Hellenes (Greeks), the Vandals, the Huns, and other peoples.  In general the Romans treated all of these peoples (with the partial exception of the Hellenes, whose culture they consciously adopted in many respects) as “barbarians,” that is, as primitive and inferior peoples who, if they came into contact with the Romans, deserved to be conquered and ruled by the Romans, especially if they had the temerity to attack any territory claimed by Romans as theirs.

What we learn is that all of these peoples, even the Huns whom the Romans gave an especially bad reputation, were in their various ways cultured and inventive ones, some even with literatures of their own from which much of the evidence Jones relies on is taken.  It was actually the Romans, Terry Jones argues, who were the “barbarians” in the sense that they were especially prone to savagery, intolerance, and repression in their dealings with the peoples they had conquered and ruled.  Perhaps most important in the long run, Jones is able to show, is that much of what was good in Roman culture was brought to the Romans by the conquered peoples, and that they were important contributors to Western civilization as we know it.

 

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH: THE EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION by Richard Dawkins

NONFICTION (SCIENCE)

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins (Free Press, 2009, paperback $16.99)

Reviewed by Laird Addis, Jr.

The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins, subtitled The Evidence for Evolution, is a wonderfully entertaining description of the multiple kinds of facts that make up the basis for the evolutionary account of life on earth.  I never tire of reading Dawkins’s books, for he is the best writer around on evolution for the non-specialist.  He uses examples and pictures in a convincing way as he tells his story of how many kinds of evidence—from DNA studies to carbon dating to the fossil record to embryology (“How could complicated organisms like humans have come from single-cell organisms?  You did it yourself in only nine months.”)  to direct observations of evolution in laboratories and nature, and much more—all come together to ground the only plausible account of how life developed from its origin more than three billion years ago.  Like Darwin, Dawkins does not try to explain the origin itself, but only how life evolved once it did exist.  There are hundreds of books on evolution, and I have read many of them, but this is possibly the best single book one could find for anyone wanting to understand how scientists know of the fact of evolution.   

THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE by Orhan Pamuk

(NOVEL)

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage International, 2009, paperback $15.95).

Reviewed by Laird Addis, Jr.

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk is yet another great novel by the Turkish writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006.  I have read all of his novels (at least all that have been translated into English) as well as his memoir of growing up in Istanbul, and may have enjoyed this one the most.  It is a perhaps slightly improbable love story that takes place mostly in Istanbul over several years, in the 1970’s and 80’s, and involves at many levels the conflicts of the traditional Muslim culture of Turkey with the secular, European- oriented culture that the founder of modern Turkey, Ataturk, established after the first world war.  There is much description of Istanbul itself (the city I most want to visit of those I have not yet visited) and the surrounding area, especially where the wealthy went (and probably still go) to get out of the city in the summer.  The history it tells during the years of the story includes the military coup of 1980, and its immediate consequences.  Finally, the story includes a wonderful kind of self-reference insofar as the author is himself a minor character in the story but with a twist not to be revealed here.  (Vintage International, 2009, paperback $15.95)

(Pamuk, incidentally, was a student in the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop in the 1980’s, which was then located in my own office building.  So I must have seen him many times, before he was famous.  The University hoped to give him an honorary doctorate a few years ago, but because of death threats against him by Islamic fanatics, the University decided it couldn’t give him adequate security.)

© 2012