Early Civilization Books - Page 6

Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. I: The Structure of Everyday Life (Civilization and Capitalism : 15th-18th Century)

Fernand Braudel

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Encyclopedic Examination of the Seemingly Mundane 5 out of 5 stars.
27 of 28 people found this review helpful.

Fernand Braudel is probably the most distinguished historian associated with the Annales School founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. This Annales method attempted to revamp historical inquiry by enlarging the scope of analysis to include disparate places and through different times. Annalists were not content to research political institutions; they wanted to delve deeper into the past, to look at social and economic factors in order to reach a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of humanity. In order to be so inclusive, the Annalists looked at historical forces over great arcs of time, recognizing that many human factors change slowly and are not capable of discovery in snapshots of time. The title of this book, "The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th to the 18th Century" captures well these two central tenets of the Annales School. "The Structures of Everyday Life" is the first volume in a three volume series.

When Braudel refers to everyday life, he means it in the strictest sense of the word. The topics covered in this encyclopedic volume are seemingly banal because they constitute the backgrounds of our lives: corn, wheat, rice, clothing, buildings, money, and other commonplace items that we take for granted in our day to day existence. Other sections deal with discerning the population of the world in a time when census records were crude or nonexistent, the development of heavy industry and its effect on the world, diseases, and shipping. The emphasis here is on economics and how the growth (or lack of) economies increases or decreases the growth of a society and how that society or region waxed or waned in prominence.

Much of the time, the greatness of Braudel's book is in a detail, or a turn of a phrase. For example, the author concludes that the massive pyramid structures and immense jungle cities of the Mesoamerican cultures resulted not from huge markets or an intrinsic need to construct enormous edifices. Instead, he traces their societal structure to agriculture, specifically the reliance on maize as the staple crop. In the warm climates of Central America, corn does not take much work to plant or maintain. This left the indigenous populations with plenty of time on their hands to build monuments and participate in elaborate religious rituals.

"Structures of Everyday Life" appears to be a huge book, and it is, but there are so many illustrations, maps, and charts that it does not take nearly as long to get through it as one might think. I read somewhere that Braudel traveled and worked abroad in places where he could obtain copies of primary historical documents, whether they were paintings, letters, financial statements, or other relevant documents. He gathered these by the thousands over the years and used them as the basis for his wide-ranging researches. You simply must admire a historian who notices someone picking food out of a bowl with his fingers and then compares this to another painting some years later where the figures are using utensils. Most people just do not think to look at things like this.

Braudel's book is a valuable contribution to historical studies, but I don't think I will read the other two volumes in the series. The amount of information in this volume is so overwhelming that I don't think I could assimilate the vast amount of facts in the other two books. As far as "Structures of Everyday Life" go, even reading one or two chapters is enough to get the gist of what Braudel is trying to say. Reading the whole thing is like reading an encyclopedia; it is fascinating but difficult.

Editorial Review:

By examining in detail the material life of pre-industrial peoples around the world, Fernand Braudel significantly changed the way historians view their subject. Volume I describes food and drink, dress and housing, demography and family structure, energy and technology, money and credit, and the growth of towns.

Civilization and Its Discontents

Sigmund Freud

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Total reviews: 36 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

For the 75th anniversary, a new edition of the seminal work with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Menand.

Civilization and Its Discontents may be Sigmund Freud's best-known work. Originally published in 1930, it seeks to answer ultimate questions: What influences led to the creation of civilization? How did it come to be? What determines its course? In this seminal volume of twentieth-century thought, Freud elucidates the contest between aggression, indeed the death drive, and its adversary eros. He speaks to issues of human creativity and fulfillment, the place of beauty in culture, and the effects of repression.

Louis Menand, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club, contributor to The New Yorker, and professor of English at Harvard University, reflects on the importance of this work in intellectual thought and why it has become such a landmark book for the history of ideas.

Not available in hardcover for decades, this beautifully rendered anniversary edition will be a welcome addition to readers' shelves.

The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids

Robert Bauval, Adrian Gilbert

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Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

AMAZING 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 11 people found this review helpful.

Next to Grahm Hancock, Robert Bauval is the creme de la creme of astro-archeology.

Everything you thought you knew about the pyramids is WRONG.

In the future the work of Bauval and Hancock is the marker that determines our understanding of ancient works like The Great Pyramid.

We are in a 'new age' of understanding our past thanks to the works of geniuses like Bauval and Hancock.

AMAZING

Amazingly boring 2 out of 5 stars.
4 of 17 people found this review helpful.

Granted, the author got some interesting ideas. But why does he hide them for the most part of the book? About 80% of the book is a repetitive description of different facts, theories and opinions, with the author arguing about "what is not correct", and no clue at what is he getting at. Well, not fare, he gives some clues, but not more. Sometimes it looks like he's got carried away with a need to talk (or write) without any point to deliver.

Again, that's not to say that he does not have any interesting things inside, he certainly has. It's just those interesting things would fit into 20 pages if described without well-known, repetitive and not-so-exciting things.

Editorial Review:

A revolutionary book that explains the most enigmatic and fascinating wonder of the ancient world: the Pyramids of Egypt. "[An] absorbing and fascinating work of archaeological detection...clearly and rivetingly told...the book is highly and compulsively readable."--London Sunday Times. 16-page black-and-white inserts.

Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

Jonathan Sacks

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Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Universals Need Not Apply 3 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

There's much to like about Sacks' book. For example, its appreciation/critique of globalization is persuasive. "Morality," Sacks reminds us, "belongs no less in the boardroom than the bedroom, in the market-place as much as in a house of prayer."

The book discusses theology as much as economics, and in doing so it does not capitulate to relativism (as a tired title like "Dignity of Difference" might lead one to believe). How could one call the book "relativist" when for Sacks, "the human project is inescapably a moral project"? How could the book be dismissed as another vacuous plea for ambivalence masked as "tolerance," when Sacks insists "something far stronger than toleration is required" in order for us to survive?

Here is Sacks' recipe for the postmodern world: "Absent religious faith, add the failure of the 'Enlightenment project' to create a universal ethic, and the result is moral relativism - a way of thinking (or rather, refusing to think) about life choices that may be suited to a consumer culture, but one that is wholly inadequate... to the challenge of assertive ethnicities and exclusive belief systems."

Rather than accepting the recipe, Sacks insists on the missing ingredient of religious faith. Though the Enlightenment predicted that religion's "public roles was at an end... The strange fact was, however, that religion refused to die. What has emerged is, in George Weigel's phrase, the 'desecularization of the world.'"

In other words, the lunar eclipse is over, and turns out the sun was there all along. Contrary to the claims of generations of European intelligentsia, God is not going away. Religion is back (even though it never really went away). Therefore, as Sacks puts it, the book is a "a theological basis for respect for difference, based not on relativism but on the concept of covenant."

And so, deeply respectful of various religions, Sacks sets out to give us religious folk a lesson in successful twenty-first century planetary cohabitation. But he does so by establishing what might be called a "New Covenant" with all world beliefs.

"The paths to salvation are many," Sacks explains. "There are multiple universes of wisdom, each capturing something of the radiance of being and refracting it into the lives of its followers, not refuting or excluding the others, each as it were the native language of its followers, but combining in a hymn of glory to the creator." If the religions of the world therefore can just accept this idea (an idea which is arguably itself a religion) then, Sacks insists, there is hope.

Sacks' motivations are of course laudable. He doesn't want us to kill each other. God, Sacks writes, "has given us the means to save us from ourselves... we are not wrong to dream, wish and work for a better world." At such points the book, in my estimation, tends to degenerate into a well documented and sophisticated version of Why can't we all just get along?

When Sacks attempts to weave his very specific Judaism into his universal covenant for all religions, things get confusing. He writes, "The God of the Israelites is the God of all mankind, but the demands made of the Israelites are not asked of all mankind." This is true enough. He concludes, "There is no equivalent in Judaism to the doctrine that extra ecclesiam non est salus, outside the Church there is no salvation." But as we've seen, Sacks is not writing only to Jews.

What if one, while revering Judaism deeply, is nevertheless not "in Judaism"? What happens when the religion one professes is founded upon the fact that it is for everyone, as Christianity certainly is. In fact, one could make the case that the universal character of the Christian faith is the point of the New Testament (or at least of Luke, Acts, Galatians and Romans). Scholars often refer to the "sociological miracle" of the first century that resulted when the tribalized Roman world found unity in diversity in one new social body - the Church. The diversity that Sacks is seeking on a global scale may be contained by design within the Christian faith.

This ideal has of course often failed (miserably failed) to be realized. But could anyone convincingly argue that it's not in the charter? A Christian will have difficulty following suit with Sacks' book, unless of course Christ's charge to "baptize all nations" actually reads "baptize some nations," or the promise that "every tongue shall confess and every knee shall bow," actually reads "some tongues and some knees," or the assurance that "Christ shall be all in all" actually reads "Christ shall be some in some."

A Christian can of course read Sacks' book, learn from it, and strongly recommend it as a thoughtful perspective on globalization from a man both deeply intelligent and faithful. But the very universal insistence that there can be no universal is hard to sign on to. A good Christian, Buddhist or Muslim or Marxist (perhaps even a good many Jews) will find themselves scratching their heads. Because Sacks deploys a universal masquerading as a diffusal of universality, his arguments should be listed among these universal options, not as a solution to their conflict.

As a Chrisitian, I'd like to conclude on a Trinitarian note. Sacks claims that "Unity in heaven creates diversity on earth." A Christian, however, does not believe in mere unity in heaven, but a diversity in heaven (the Trinity) that, strangely, can creates a unity on earth. Sacks is concerned that we make space for one another in our dialog, and it is of course a genuine one. So much so that even God has followed Sacks' advice. If within the Trinity itself God has already permitted a diversity amidst Father, Son and Spirit - then there is no risk in humanity losing our distinctions (individually or even nationally) by participating in the life of this kind of God. To put it otherwise, if the "Absolute" is in itself diversified, then the postmodern prejudice against "Absolute Truth" (a prejudice which haunts Sacks' book as clandestinely as Plato's ghost haunts the West) has no beef with the Trinity.

This God is so free in fact that he can even give the different persons within his Godhead freedom - so free that he can even give his own creatures freedom to rebel against him. He is free enough to give them the choice to accept, or not accept his reconciling love. This God is so powerful that he can become a creature among his creatures, allowing himself to be tried and condemned as a criminal in a gesture of suffering love. Such is the "freedom" and "power" of the Trinity. So free and powerful it can be bound helplessly to a cross. One might suggest a concept of God like that can afford to be universal.

I only wish there was room for such universality in Sacks' book.

Editorial Review:

The tragedy of September 11 intensified the danger caused by religious differences around the world. As the politics of identity begin to replace the politics of ideology, can religion, Sacks asks, become a force for peace? "The Dignity of Difference is his radical proposal for reconciling hatreds. Sacks argues that we must do more than search for values common to all faiths; we must also reframe the way we see our differences.

Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West

Anthony Pagden

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Spanning two and a half millennia, Anthony Pagden’s mesmerizing Worlds at War delves deep into the roots of the “clash of civilizations” between East and West that has always been a battle over ideas, and whose issues have never been more urgent.

Worlds At War begins in the ancient world, where Greece saw its fight against the Persian Empire as one between freedom and slavery, between monarchy and democracy, between individuality and the worship of men as gods. Here, richly rendered, are the crucial battle of Marathon, considered the turning point of Greek and European history; the heroic attempt by the Greeks to turn the Persians back at Thermopylae; and Salamis, one of the greatest naval battles of all time, which put an end to the Persian threat forever.

From there Pagden’s story sweeps to Rome, which created the modern concepts of citizenship and the rule of law. Rome’s leaders believed those they conquered to be free, while the various peoples of the East persisted in seeing their subjects as property. Pagden dramatizes the birth of Christianity in the East and its use in the West as an instrument of government, setting the stage for what would become, and has remained, a global battle of the secular against the sacred. Then Islam, at first ridiculed in Christian Europe, drives Pope Urban II to launch the Crusades, which transform the relationship between East and West into one of competing religious beliefs.

Modern times bring a first world war, which among its many murky aims seeks to redesign the Muslim world by force. In our own era, Muslims now find themselves in unwelcoming Western societies, while the West seeks to enforce democracy and its own secular values through occupation in the East. Pagden ends on a cautionary note, warning that terrorism and war will continue as long as sacred and secular remain confused in the minds of so many.
Eye-opening and compulsively readable, Worlds at War is a stunning work of history and a triumph of modern scholarship. It is bound to become the definitive work on the reasons behind the age-old and still escalating struggle that, more than any other, has come to define the modern world–a book for anyone seeking to know why “we came to be the way we are.”

The Lessons of History

Will Durant, Ariel Durant

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Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this illuminating and thoughtful book, Will and Ariel Durant have succeeded in distilling for the reader the accumulated store of knowledge and experience from their four decades of work on the ten monumental volumes of The Story of Civilization. The result is a survey of human history, full of dazzling insights into the nature of human experience, the evolution of civilization, the culture of man. With the completion of their life's work they look back and ask what history has to say about the nature, the conduct and the prospects of man, seeking in the great lives, the great ideas, the great events of the past for the meaning of man's long journey through war, conquest and creation -- and for the great themes that can help us to understand our own era.

To the Durants, history is "not merely a warning reminder of man's follies and crimes, but also an encouraging remembrance of generative souls...a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing...."

Designed to accompany the ten-volume set of The Story of Civilization, The Lessons of History is, in its own right, a profound and original work of history and philosophy.

The Ascent of Humanity

Charles Eisenstein

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Ascent of Humanity is a radical exploration of the history and future of civilization from a unique perspective: the human sense of self. Eisenstein traces all of the converging crises of our age to a common source, which he calls Separation. It is the ideology of the discrete and separate self that has generated these crises; therefore, he argues, nothing less than a "revolution in human beingness" will be sufficient to transform our relationship to each other and the planet. And this revolution is underway already. In all realms of human endeavor, an Age of Reunion is emerging out of the birth-pangs of a planet in crisis. The range and depth of Eisenstein's thesis is breath-taking. Encompassing science, religion, spirituality, technology, economics, medicine, education, and more, he details a vast paradigm shift reflecting a more fundamental shift in the human sense of self. Even in this dark hour, he says, a more beautiful world is possible -- but not through the extension of millennia-old methods of management and control. The convergence of crises is revealing the final bankruptcy of those methods. Soon, he says, we will abandon the Babelian effort to build a tower to Heaven, as we realize that the sky is all around us already. Then, we will turn our efforts to creating a new kind of civilization, a conscious civilization designed for beauty rather than height.

The Lost Civilization of Lemuria: The Rise and Fall of the Worlds Oldest Culture

Frank Joseph

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A compelling new portrait of the lost realm of Lemuria, the original motherland of humanity

• Contains the most extensive and up-to-date archaeological research on Lemuria

• Reveals a lost, ancient technology in some respects more advanced than modern science

• Provides evidence that the perennial philosophies have their origin in Lemurian culture

Before the Indonesian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans, there was the destruction of Lemuria. Oral tradition in Polynesia recounts the story of a splendid kingdom that was carried to the bottom of the sea by a mighty “warrior wave”--a tsunami. This lost realm has been cited in numerous other indigenous traditions, spanning the globe from Australia to Asia to the coasts of both South and North America. It was known as Lemuria or Mu, a vast realm of islands and archipelagoes that once sprawled across the Pacific Ocean. Relying on 10 years of research and extensive travel, Frank Joseph offers a compelling picture of this mother­land of humanity, which he suggests was the original Garden of Eden.

Using recent deep-sea archaeological finds, enigmatic glyphs and symbols, and ancient records shared by cultures divided by great distances that document the story of this sunken world, Joseph painstakingly re-creates a picture of this civilization in which people lived in rare harmony and possessed a sophisticated technology that allowed them to harness the weather, defy gravity, and conduct genetic investigations far beyond what is possible today. When disaster struck Lemuria, the survivors made their way to other parts of the world, incorporating their scientific and mystical skills into the existing cultures of Asia, Polynesia, and the Americas. Totem poles of the Pacific Northwest, architecture in China, the colossal stone statues on Easter Island, and even the perennial philosophies all reveal their kinship to this now-vanished civilization.

The Woman Who Walked into the Sea: Huntington's and the Making of a Genetic Disease

Alice Wexler

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Editorial Review:

When Phebe Hedges, a woman in East Hampton, New York, walked into the sea in 1806, she made visible the historical experience of a family affected by the dreaded disorder of movement, mind, and mood her neighbors called St.Vitus's dance. Doctors later spoke of Huntington’s chorea, and today it is known as Huntington's disease. This book is the first history of Huntington’s in America.

Starting with the life of Phebe Hedges, Alice Wexler uses Huntington’s as a lens to explore the changing meanings of heredity, disability, stigma, and medical knowledge among ordinary people as well as scientists and physicians. She addresses these themes through three overlapping stories: the lives of a nineteenth-century family once said to “belong to the disease”; the emergence of Huntington’s chorea as a clinical entity; and the early-twentieth-century transformation of this disorder into a cautionary eugenics tale. In our own era of expanding genetic technologies, this history offers insights into the social contexts of medical and scientific knowledge, as well as the legacy of eugenics in shaping both the knowledge and the lived experience of this disease.

The Making of the Middle Ages

R. W. Southern

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Fascinating, but not introductory-level material 5 out of 5 stars.
130 of 130 people found this review helpful.

The Making of the Middle Ages by RW Southern
When I asked for suggestions as to what I should read to expand my knowledge of the social history of the Middle Ages, a friend with a degree in Medieval History suggested Richard Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages. I was hoping for a fairly straightforward book about women, warfare, technology, medicine, what it was like to live in a Medieval town and so forth, and The Making of the Middle Ages is not that book. It is, nevertheless, a fascinating and well written volume, and well worth the time and money.
Southern limits his discussion to the period from the end of the 10th century to the beginning of the 13th century--from 972 to 1204 to be exact. The book is divided into five chapters: the first discusses the relationship between Europe and its neighbors--the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic countries. The general European perception of these countries, trade, the Crusades, and the transmission of knowledge all form parts of this chapter. The second chapter is on "The Bonds of Society"; in this chapter Southern treats the emergence of centralized government, serfdom, and the idea of knighthood. The third chapter deals with Christianity and society--the mingling of secular and sacred in the medieval church, the growth of power of the papacy, and monasticism. The fourth chapter is about intellectual and literary changes which took place during Southern's period, and the final chapter "From Epic to Romance" concerns the growing interest in mysticism, in the cult of the Virgin, and in more personal forms of piety. One of the most charming aspects of The Making of the Middle Ages is the astonishing diversity of the anecdotes that Southern relates to illustrate his points. Southern introduces us to a host of interesting and esoteric historical figures: the "nameless traveller" who carried the news of the death of Count Wilfred of Cerdana from Spain through France and into Germany; the elusive Prester John; the heroic Boethius who undertook the Herculean task of saving the entire corpus of Greek scholarship; and the virtually unknown Peter of Blois--poet, archdeacon, and correspondent--whose letters give us a glimpse into the life of a high-ranking ecclesiastical official, to list only a few. Southern also relates, with vigor and style, the history of the bloody and cynical Counts of Anjou and how they slowly and strategically consolidated and expanded their territorial holdings.
Southern's language is also amusing. This is not a dry textbook-style introduction to Medieval history--Southern allows himself to indulge in the colorful turns of phrase which impart so much pleasure to reading, but which have been so rigorously winnowed out of most scholarly and academic writing. My copy of The Making of the Middle Ages is full of underlined passages which are interesting for their writing as much as for their content. In the final chapter of the book ("From Epic to Romance"), Southern observes that "Chretien probes the heart, but it is the enamelled heart of the twelfth-century secular world, not yet made tender by the penetration of strong religious feeling." I don't know if I will ever have occasion to refer to the "enamelled heart of the twelfth century secular world," but I hope I will.
However, from the point of view of an interested layperson, The Making of the Middle Ages is a challenging read. Southern assumes a great deal of knowledge on the part of his reader, and many of the connections he draws are difficult to appreciate for someone who has only a tenuous grasp on Medieval history and who is struggling to assimilate the mass of information on which the author is drawing to support his points. Also, Southern's book has something in common with another book that I continue to enjoy each time I read it: Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity. Each time I open The World of Late Antiquity, I am again charmed by Brown's style and by the subtle connections that he draws. Yet as soon as I put it down, the details begin to slip away from me. I am afraid that The Making of the Middle Ages may have the same ephemeral effect on my understanding of the late 10th to the early 13th centuries, but I would nonetheless recommend it to anyone who has at least a Western-civ level of background knowledge to provide a jumping-off point from which to appreciate this book.