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readallthenewberys2012-09-04 09:10 pm
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2012-09-04 09:10 pm
Newbery Medal: The Story of Mankind (Hendrik Willem van Loon), Part 2
Onward the course of History takes its way! XD
...this is a really weird book. I'm partly quite enjoying it - there are bits, especially the illustrations, that are downright adorable - and partly I just can't look away. The sociopolitical tone is so off-the-wall, I can't wait to see what happens next. ;P It's like it isn't even the history of the world I know.
* And we begin with the Peloponnesian War! (The big war between Athens and Sparta, that would be - for those of you who didn't spend a disproportionate amount of middle school studying The Classical World. *g*)
* Oh, Gordon Bennett. "Athens rose high from the plain. It was a city exposed to the fresh breezes from the sea, willing to look at the world with the eyes of a happy child. Sparta, on the other hand, was built at the bottom of a deep valley, and used the surrounding mountains as a barrier against foreign thought." You see what I mean? It's so beautifully written! And also so very... LOLWUT. ;-)
* I could keep quoting. It's an extremely quotable book, both in the sense of "look here is a pretty" and in the sense of "DO YOU BELIEVE HE SAID THIS". XP
* And, you know, it's not like I'm not learning anything. I was quite startled here to learn that Athens lost the Peloponnesian War! People gloss this stuff over. One thing about Mr Hendrik Willem van Loon, he does sometimes manage to make his point without ignoring actual history: he explains here that Athens lost the war, and then gives us a couple of gorgeous paragraphs on "that wonderful desire to learn and to know and to investigate" that spread from Athens to all the corners of the free world. :D
* Here comes Alexander the Great!
* OH ROFLOL FOREVER. I cannot believe this book exists. Listen to this! "It irritated him [Alexander's dad, Philip of Macedon] to see a perfectly good people [the southern Greeks] waste its men and money upon fruitless quarrels. So he settled the difficulty by making himself master of all Greece". I cannot even forever.
* I may sound snarky, but (except when I start flailing about Thermopylae and similar) I'm really enjoying this. It's so extremely cracktastic. I said that, didn't I? ;-)
* Heh, if I'd turned one more page I could have cut off Liveblog Part 1 at the "Summary of Chapters 1 to 20". :D
* Anyway. The chapter on Alexander the Great is almost entirely concerned with how he spread Greek knowledge throughout the known world (except India - Mr van Loon doesn't say "except India") and how, via the Roman Empire, that influenced our culture today.
* "Egyptians and Babylonians and Phoenicians and a large number of Semitic tribes... have carred the torch that was to illuminate the world. They now hand it over to the Indo-European Greeks, who become the teachers of another Indo-European tribe, called the Romans. But meanwhile the Semites have pushed westward along the northern coast of Africa and have made themselves the rulers of the western half of the Mediterranean just when the eastern half has become a Greek (or Indo-European) possession." Enter Carthage, in other words. "Asia vs Europe" again, as the background of the Punic Wars.
* The chapter head about the Punic Wars specifies Carthage as being Semitic and Rome as Indo-European. From a post-World War II standpoint, this makes me very dubious; I'm remembering a quote by G.K. Chesterton in the 1930s about "those sturdy Aryans, from whom we were descended right up to the outbreak of the Great War, and from whom we are now showing signs of being descended again". :P Chesterton was nowhere near perfect on the racism question himself, but he did have a good point about the white superiority complex that led, in one way or another, to both world wars.
* Carthage's location was "almost too ideal. It grew too fast and became too rich." I'd snark harder, but Mr van Loon goes on to do a little sermon about the evils of plutocracy which seems a bit prescient for 21st century America, considering. ;-)
* He states flat-out that the tales of Romulus and Remus "are fairy stories and do not belong in a history." Wiki agrees, but adds that as far as we know the story was first codified... during the Punic Wars! Presumably by way of raising Roman morale.
* Ooh, so much history they didn't know yet. He has the Etruscans as early enemies of the Romans (contradistinguished from their early ancestors / relatives), and notes that no Etruscan writing had yet been deciphered. Our knowledge of the language is still very incomplete, but we apparently have the letters now. (I am amused to note, per Mr van Loon, that "these written messages are, so far, merely annoying and not at all useful". He's got an interesting set of word-choices all round, really.)
* Oh argh. Sir, please. The Romans "understood the tendency of the multitude... only too well to waste valuable time upon mere talk. They therefore placed the actual business of running the city into the hands of two consuls" etc etc Senate yadda yadda. LET'S all advocate giving power to a few Smart Dudes because the multitude are too damn chatty to rule themselves, shall we! o_O Seriously, if you're going to take this uplifting We Are The Pinnacle Of Civilization tone, you shouldn't also snob at the masses; it's disturbingly incongruous. :P
* Okay, frankly, I'm not stopping reading this book despite all the twitches it gives me because I am just too fascinated by WHAT ON EARTH HE'LL DO NEXT. ;-) The fascination outweighs the arghliness. (...that's so totally a word. Okay, it isn't; I've just recently discovered Kingdom of Loathing and it's affecting my vocabulary. *g*)
* He's asserting that the anyone-can-theoretically-be-a-Roman-citizen thing was a major source of Rome's power, though, because they were the first big melting pot and absorbed the barbarians instead of having uneasy truces with them and stuff. I don't know how true that is, but it's rather an interesting idea.
* This book IN A NUTSHELL, ladies, gents, and non-binary-identified people: a reasonably detailed and accurate account of the three Punic Wars is concluded with "For the next thousand years the Mediterranean remained a European sea. But as soon as the Roman Empire had been destroyed, Asia made another attempt to dominate this great inland sea, as you will learn when I tell you about Mohammed." It may be worth noting at this point that 1922 was also the year of the Married Women's Citizenship Act, a law which allowed a US woman who married a noncitizen to keep her citizenship... as long as her husband was not of Asian origin. It was an improvement over previous law, under which a woman who married a non-naturalized man would always take her husband's national citizenship and lose her US citizenship, but the specifically anti-Asian thing stuck in my mind.
* I wonder when I'll hit the first book on this list that DOESN'T endorse racism? (Unless Golden Fleece didn't. I can't recall. I think it might not have, which, four for you, Padraic Colum.)
* This chapter is about how the Roman Empire absolutely happened entirely by accident, oh yes, we swear it, precious. ;P Nobody ever got up and said "we must found an Empire", and any speeches about "eastward the course of Roman Empire, etc, etc" would cause all "average Romans" to hastily leave the forum. That noble clod, the Average Roman Joe, "just continued to take more and more land because circumstances forced him to do so." They just haaaaad to conquer and then administrate all the countries surrounding them because their enemies kept picking on them! ...are you really saying all this with a straight face, Mr van Loon? Wow. (He doesn't use those words, because he's trying to make them sound sympathetic. I'm not. *g*)
* This section is actually about the transition between the Roman Republic and the Julian Empire, but I got distracted by an offhand reference to Mithridates. I understand you're trying to keep (fairly) strictly historical, Mr van Loon, and not devolve into a collection of folktales... but do you have to say "Mithridates took poison and killed himself"? Because he apparently did, but SEPARATELY - he tried to poison himself, but his VERY FAMOUS self-induced immunity to poisons prevented him dying of it! So he died by the sword, at his bodyguard's hand. *headshake* Details, man. Seriously, A.E. Housman had already published the poem ending "Mithridates, he died old" nearly thirty years before. Even I know that one.
* Dude, the Pompey-Julius Caesar-Crassus Triumvirate is straight-up described as a "Vigilante Committee". *scrunchy face* I can't find a reference on Wiki for once, but I know from Foghorns by Howard Pease (that's not a very complimentary article, but he's one of my favorite YA adventure writers, though admittedly short on ladies) that the union/anti-union violence of the 1930s included a white-collar movement toward reviving the Gold-Rush-era "Vigilance Committees" in San Francisco and possibly elsewhere. Is this an early sign of the same social movement? I WONDER.
* You know, I DID NOT KNOW that the burning of the Library of Alexandria was reputedly an accident, but Wiki confirms. Apparently Caesar burned some boats because of reasons (Wiki and van Loon disagree on whose boats and why), and the sparks set light to the library, which was near the harbor. Well, that's the common story. Wiki cites a contradictory report that the library was nowhere near the harbor and what got burned was mostly shipping records, but... I don't even know. Me, I always thought somebody sacked the city!
* More things I didn't know: the exact timeline of Cleopatra, who died about 15 years after Julius Caesar (by whom she had a son, "Caesarion"). I think I confused Brutus and Marc Antony while watching Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. *sheepish grin* I never claimed to be qualified to review Newberys? ;P
* The next chapter consists entirely of two fictional (I presume) letters between an uncle and nephew in the year 62 A.D., discussing the death of St Paul and the rise of the new Christian religion. I assume they're fictional because they contain pointed remarks in Mr van Loon's style, like describing the Christian God as "so very different" from the Jewish Jehovah... (Well, also because I don't think "Gladius" was ever a Roman first name, even for a soldier. O_O)
* Now we have the decline and fall of the Roman empire, fairly well-researched from what I can tell, although of course it's laced with the usual unproven assertions about what the original inhabitants thought of it, and a reference to "evil-smelling and hairy barbarians" for good measure.
* ...I'm afraid I'm letting this book come off worse than it actually is. The trouble is that the well-done parts aren't usually very interesting, and the bad parts are HILARIOUSLY QUOTABLE. It makes for a skewed sample. :P
* Anyway, that chapter ends with a nice little paragraph on how the Church saved Civilization. I'm guessing that's the subject of the next chapter or so. Which means we're getting into the Dark/Middle Ages (they're lumped together here, more or less, as I see from the table of contents).
...this is a really weird book. I'm partly quite enjoying it - there are bits, especially the illustrations, that are downright adorable - and partly I just can't look away. The sociopolitical tone is so off-the-wall, I can't wait to see what happens next. ;P It's like it isn't even the history of the world I know.
* And we begin with the Peloponnesian War! (The big war between Athens and Sparta, that would be - for those of you who didn't spend a disproportionate amount of middle school studying The Classical World. *g*)
* Oh, Gordon Bennett. "Athens rose high from the plain. It was a city exposed to the fresh breezes from the sea, willing to look at the world with the eyes of a happy child. Sparta, on the other hand, was built at the bottom of a deep valley, and used the surrounding mountains as a barrier against foreign thought." You see what I mean? It's so beautifully written! And also so very... LOLWUT. ;-)
* I could keep quoting. It's an extremely quotable book, both in the sense of "look here is a pretty" and in the sense of "DO YOU BELIEVE HE SAID THIS". XP
* And, you know, it's not like I'm not learning anything. I was quite startled here to learn that Athens lost the Peloponnesian War! People gloss this stuff over. One thing about Mr Hendrik Willem van Loon, he does sometimes manage to make his point without ignoring actual history: he explains here that Athens lost the war, and then gives us a couple of gorgeous paragraphs on "that wonderful desire to learn and to know and to investigate" that spread from Athens to all the corners of the free world. :D
* Here comes Alexander the Great!
* OH ROFLOL FOREVER. I cannot believe this book exists. Listen to this! "It irritated him [Alexander's dad, Philip of Macedon] to see a perfectly good people [the southern Greeks] waste its men and money upon fruitless quarrels. So he settled the difficulty by making himself master of all Greece". I cannot even forever.
* I may sound snarky, but (except when I start flailing about Thermopylae and similar) I'm really enjoying this. It's so extremely cracktastic. I said that, didn't I? ;-)
* Heh, if I'd turned one more page I could have cut off Liveblog Part 1 at the "Summary of Chapters 1 to 20". :D
* Anyway. The chapter on Alexander the Great is almost entirely concerned with how he spread Greek knowledge throughout the known world (except India - Mr van Loon doesn't say "except India") and how, via the Roman Empire, that influenced our culture today.
* "Egyptians and Babylonians and Phoenicians and a large number of Semitic tribes... have carred the torch that was to illuminate the world. They now hand it over to the Indo-European Greeks, who become the teachers of another Indo-European tribe, called the Romans. But meanwhile the Semites have pushed westward along the northern coast of Africa and have made themselves the rulers of the western half of the Mediterranean just when the eastern half has become a Greek (or Indo-European) possession." Enter Carthage, in other words. "Asia vs Europe" again, as the background of the Punic Wars.
* The chapter head about the Punic Wars specifies Carthage as being Semitic and Rome as Indo-European. From a post-World War II standpoint, this makes me very dubious; I'm remembering a quote by G.K. Chesterton in the 1930s about "those sturdy Aryans, from whom we were descended right up to the outbreak of the Great War, and from whom we are now showing signs of being descended again". :P Chesterton was nowhere near perfect on the racism question himself, but he did have a good point about the white superiority complex that led, in one way or another, to both world wars.
* Carthage's location was "almost too ideal. It grew too fast and became too rich." I'd snark harder, but Mr van Loon goes on to do a little sermon about the evils of plutocracy which seems a bit prescient for 21st century America, considering. ;-)
* He states flat-out that the tales of Romulus and Remus "are fairy stories and do not belong in a history." Wiki agrees, but adds that as far as we know the story was first codified... during the Punic Wars! Presumably by way of raising Roman morale.
* Ooh, so much history they didn't know yet. He has the Etruscans as early enemies of the Romans (contradistinguished from their early ancestors / relatives), and notes that no Etruscan writing had yet been deciphered. Our knowledge of the language is still very incomplete, but we apparently have the letters now. (I am amused to note, per Mr van Loon, that "these written messages are, so far, merely annoying and not at all useful". He's got an interesting set of word-choices all round, really.)
* Oh argh. Sir, please. The Romans "understood the tendency of the multitude... only too well to waste valuable time upon mere talk. They therefore placed the actual business of running the city into the hands of two consuls" etc etc Senate yadda yadda. LET'S all advocate giving power to a few Smart Dudes because the multitude are too damn chatty to rule themselves, shall we! o_O Seriously, if you're going to take this uplifting We Are The Pinnacle Of Civilization tone, you shouldn't also snob at the masses; it's disturbingly incongruous. :P
* Okay, frankly, I'm not stopping reading this book despite all the twitches it gives me because I am just too fascinated by WHAT ON EARTH HE'LL DO NEXT. ;-) The fascination outweighs the arghliness. (...that's so totally a word. Okay, it isn't; I've just recently discovered Kingdom of Loathing and it's affecting my vocabulary. *g*)
* He's asserting that the anyone-can-theoretically-be-a-Roman-citizen thing was a major source of Rome's power, though, because they were the first big melting pot and absorbed the barbarians instead of having uneasy truces with them and stuff. I don't know how true that is, but it's rather an interesting idea.
* This book IN A NUTSHELL, ladies, gents, and non-binary-identified people: a reasonably detailed and accurate account of the three Punic Wars is concluded with "For the next thousand years the Mediterranean remained a European sea. But as soon as the Roman Empire had been destroyed, Asia made another attempt to dominate this great inland sea, as you will learn when I tell you about Mohammed." It may be worth noting at this point that 1922 was also the year of the Married Women's Citizenship Act, a law which allowed a US woman who married a noncitizen to keep her citizenship... as long as her husband was not of Asian origin. It was an improvement over previous law, under which a woman who married a non-naturalized man would always take her husband's national citizenship and lose her US citizenship, but the specifically anti-Asian thing stuck in my mind.
* I wonder when I'll hit the first book on this list that DOESN'T endorse racism? (Unless Golden Fleece didn't. I can't recall. I think it might not have, which, four for you, Padraic Colum.)
* This chapter is about how the Roman Empire absolutely happened entirely by accident, oh yes, we swear it, precious. ;P Nobody ever got up and said "we must found an Empire", and any speeches about "eastward the course of Roman Empire, etc, etc" would cause all "average Romans" to hastily leave the forum. That noble clod, the Average Roman Joe, "just continued to take more and more land because circumstances forced him to do so." They just haaaaad to conquer and then administrate all the countries surrounding them because their enemies kept picking on them! ...are you really saying all this with a straight face, Mr van Loon? Wow. (He doesn't use those words, because he's trying to make them sound sympathetic. I'm not. *g*)
* This section is actually about the transition between the Roman Republic and the Julian Empire, but I got distracted by an offhand reference to Mithridates. I understand you're trying to keep (fairly) strictly historical, Mr van Loon, and not devolve into a collection of folktales... but do you have to say "Mithridates took poison and killed himself"? Because he apparently did, but SEPARATELY - he tried to poison himself, but his VERY FAMOUS self-induced immunity to poisons prevented him dying of it! So he died by the sword, at his bodyguard's hand. *headshake* Details, man. Seriously, A.E. Housman had already published the poem ending "Mithridates, he died old" nearly thirty years before. Even I know that one.
* Dude, the Pompey-Julius Caesar-Crassus Triumvirate is straight-up described as a "Vigilante Committee". *scrunchy face* I can't find a reference on Wiki for once, but I know from Foghorns by Howard Pease (that's not a very complimentary article, but he's one of my favorite YA adventure writers, though admittedly short on ladies) that the union/anti-union violence of the 1930s included a white-collar movement toward reviving the Gold-Rush-era "Vigilance Committees" in San Francisco and possibly elsewhere. Is this an early sign of the same social movement? I WONDER.
* You know, I DID NOT KNOW that the burning of the Library of Alexandria was reputedly an accident, but Wiki confirms. Apparently Caesar burned some boats because of reasons (Wiki and van Loon disagree on whose boats and why), and the sparks set light to the library, which was near the harbor. Well, that's the common story. Wiki cites a contradictory report that the library was nowhere near the harbor and what got burned was mostly shipping records, but... I don't even know. Me, I always thought somebody sacked the city!
* More things I didn't know: the exact timeline of Cleopatra, who died about 15 years after Julius Caesar (by whom she had a son, "Caesarion"). I think I confused Brutus and Marc Antony while watching Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. *sheepish grin* I never claimed to be qualified to review Newberys? ;P
* The next chapter consists entirely of two fictional (I presume) letters between an uncle and nephew in the year 62 A.D., discussing the death of St Paul and the rise of the new Christian religion. I assume they're fictional because they contain pointed remarks in Mr van Loon's style, like describing the Christian God as "so very different" from the Jewish Jehovah... (Well, also because I don't think "Gladius" was ever a Roman first name, even for a soldier. O_O)
* Now we have the decline and fall of the Roman empire, fairly well-researched from what I can tell, although of course it's laced with the usual unproven assertions about what the original inhabitants thought of it, and a reference to "evil-smelling and hairy barbarians" for good measure.
* ...I'm afraid I'm letting this book come off worse than it actually is. The trouble is that the well-done parts aren't usually very interesting, and the bad parts are HILARIOUSLY QUOTABLE. It makes for a skewed sample. :P
* Anyway, that chapter ends with a nice little paragraph on how the Church saved Civilization. I'm guessing that's the subject of the next chapter or so. Which means we're getting into the Dark/Middle Ages (they're lumped together here, more or less, as I see from the table of contents).
no subject
And no, "Gladius" is like naming a kid "Sword," it wasn't something you did. O.o
no subject
I'm going a bit faster than he is; he's going pretty fast, but I'm also in "one bullet point per chapter" mode because this thing is HUMONGOUS. And hard to engage with in detail. ;S
Yep, I'm familiar with the name "Gaius", which I assume is being evoked her - I almost skimmed over the actual name - but I also speak a little Latin (I sang with a Latin Mass choir for several years), and what. O_O Maybe it's intended as some sort of nickname? The guy billed as "Gladius Esca" is supposed to be a career soldier.
...naah. What. ;P