Paperback Choice: Robert Pearce Looks at a Selection of the Season's Titles Newly out in Paperback
Magazine article by Robert Pearce; History Today, Vol. 54, May 2004
Magazine Article Excerpt
Paperback Choice: Robert Pearce Looks at a Selection of the Season's Titles Newly out in Paperback. by Robert Pearce YOUR MANUSCRIPT IS BOTH GOOD AND ORIGINAL,' pronounced Dr Johnson; 'but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.' It is too cynical to suggest that a three-word quotation would these clays be culled from this magisterial rebuke to advertise a published version of the manuscript? Certainly the greet majority of the latest history paperbacks are endorsed with glowing praise from reviewers and publishers' readers, Words like 'brilliant', 'superb', 'magnificent', 'excellent', 'exquisite', 'enthralling', fascinating', 'riveting', 'stunning',' majestic' and 'masterly' are emblazoned on back or front covers. Such stark superlatives may stop one publisher stealing a march on another, but their effect is to numb the mind of the reader and compound the difficulty of knowing which books to buy. It was thus a relief to find several new books unendorsed by the experts. Even so, the publishers of The Story of England by Tom Beaumont James (Tempus, 12.99 [pounds sterling]) have provided an unhelpful gloss. Its 275 pages (of unusually large clear print) are described as providing a 'comprehensive' guide from England's prehistory to Cool Britannia, a period of over half a million years; the stock phrase 'compulsively readable and accessible' is added; and the book is said to be 'fabulously' illustrated. The book contains a modest two-page bibliography and no references (a relief from some, whose scholarly apparatus resemble those of unusually zealous PhD students); and its early portions, which skilfully blend history and archaeology, seemed--to one with little background knowledge--a fine, no-nonsense introduction. The later portions though--to one with a reasonable existing knowledge--often seemed a jejune narrative. Nor does the author's likening of history to a human life-cycle, so that we are now settled into 'a grand, if troubled, old age', seem particularly apt--unless, that is, global warming, or nuclear or biological threats, kill off England's ageing carcase.In contrast, Hugh Kennedy's The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates (Pearson, 19.99 [pounds sterling]) is a much more scholarly book, replete with a forty-page essay on principal sources and ten pages of maps and genealogical tables. It provides a guide to the history of the Near East from around AD 600 (the period of Muhammad and hence the birth of Islamic society), via the great conquests and the golden age of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, to AD 1050, with fragmentation and the beginning of the era of the Great Seljuks. The author strikes a balance between a 'basic framework of chronological narrative' and 'long-term social and economic change', though to the uninitiated the former bears more than a passing resemblance to one of those monstrous biblical lists of who begat whom. Yet it is hard to credit the publisher's somewhat opportunist claim that this book, so obviously written for students, will truthfully appeal to general readers as 'a clear, informative and readable' introduction to a subject on which, apparently, a post-Saddam world population is 'increasingly eager to expand their knowledge'.Far more genuinely topical is Andrew Sinclair's An Anatomy of Terror (Pan, 8.99 [pounds sterling]), which begins with the Roman destruction of Carthage and ends with the attack on the World Trade Center. As such, say the publishers, this is (of course!) not only a bold, incisive, compelling and brilliant book, it is 'an essential history for our times'. It struck me as spirited and sprightly but as having the defects of its virtues. The definition offered of terror is inclusive; there is no essential difference between legal and illicit terror; nearly all those who take over nation states have terrorist acts to their discredit; and every country involved in war is guilty of some terror tactics, just as every major religion has justified sacred wars. Therefore, in the progress from Homer to al-Qaida, Sinclair finds it necessary to give us a potted, and highly sanguinary, account of man's inhumanity to man in over forty short chapters, a series of hors d'oeuvres with no main course. It is an engrossing but essentially simple book, its final message being that 'Terror will be for ever with us' and that the war on terror must be never-ending.More substance is provided in Armed Struggle: the History of the IRA (Pan, 9.99 [pounds sterling]). Its author, Richard English, has aimed to avoid the sins of similar books ('a hazily romantic approach and an unhelpfully condemnatory spirit') and to show what the IRA ... |
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