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readallthenewberys2012-09-12 11:24 pm
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2012-09-12 11:24 pm
Newbery Medal: The Story of White People - I Mean Mankind (Hendrik Willem van Loon), Part 5
The last post brought us up to page 207, anyway. I did some math: I'm 43% of the way done!
This book has taken me over a month to review. Admittedly, part of that was being on official hiatus, but part of it was just... this is a very dense book. It's got a lot of references I don't know anything about; my search history has probably hit the point where anyone who subpoenaed it would just be utterly perplexed. (Not that it was ever very incriminating. The basic stew of "[contact info/hours/address for X]", "what time should i go to bed calculator", and "muffaletta" has just been spiced up a bit by the addition of "venice council of ten", "milled coins history", "otto emperor" etc.)
Anyway. ENTER THE RENAISSANCE!
* Leeeeet me just re-quote that chapter heading: "People Once More Dared To Be Happy Just Because They Were Alive. They Tried To Save The Remains Of The Older And More Agreeable Civilisation Of Rome And Greece" etc etc. I don't know! It just... makes me lol.
* He is trying very hard NOT to draw history in broad sweeping strokes! Here, for instance, he mocks the idea of sudden switching between eras (again). People, he says, "think of the Middle Ages as a period of darkness and ignorance. 'Click!' says the clock, and the Renaissance begins and cities and palaces are flooded with the bright sunlight of an eager intellectual curiosity." Which is followed, it looks like, by an encomium on the High Middle Ages... but he already lost me by dissing Albert the Great. :P
* Haha! He draws a picture, amusing even if not accurate (I don't know if it is or not, and I feel it necessary to disclaim this stuff now), of the burghers of City Hall struggling against their feudal masters, of the guildsmen fighting with City Hall, and then... "The king and his shrewd advisers went fishing in these troubled waters and caught many a shining bass of profit which they proceeded to cook and eat before the noses of the surprised and disappointed councillors and guild brethren." BWAHAHAHAHA. It really is a worthwhile book to read if you like good turns of phrase and ranting about bad history! :D It just isn't what I signed up for. At all. Wow.
* He also says fairly accurately that the Middle Ages were "internationally minded". (Like most other things he says, I doubt it's COMPLETELY true - when do I get to read Trumpeter of Krakow? *checks* 1929, yay! I thought of it because there's a scene where gangs of young men from different regions of Europe get in a fight. OTOH, it's 15th century iirc.) But he explains it well, the loyalty to your little town rather than to a "nation", and Latin as the universal language of learning allowing someone like Erasmus of Rotterdam - oh, you go, Mr van Loon, get that Dutch history in there at every opportunity! ;-) - to reach a worldwide audience without needing translation out of Dutch and into twenty other languages.
* (I want to find out now when English became the universal language of commerce. It still isn't the universal language of learning, as I am finding out. *g*)
* OH BWAHAHA he has so many good sections! He well and truly sporks the modern way of founding a university all from scratch in a lump, with the teachers hired last, instead of the university growing from "o hai, Respected Wise Man, teach me your wisdom!" and then later - as he also describes - "oh pfft, I don't have to teach in the same place as THAT JERK anymore, I'mma go found Oxford kthxbai". *g* (Lolspeak mine.)
* Hello Dante! I did not know Dante was so early. I always put him in the 1400s, but he was born in 1265 according to this. Cool. (Oh, I see; he wrote the Divine Comedy in the 1300s, which literary people call "the fourteenth century", that's how I got confused.)
* Wait, did Dante really switch his allegiance from the Guelphs to the Ghibellines? NO WONDER everybody was mad at him (if this is true)! *pokes Wiki*
* NO HE DIDN'T. There was a split among the Guelphs and Dante was a White Guelph, while the Black Guelphs took power in Florence. Mr van Loon is just using the "Dante became a Ghibelline!" claim to support his own imperialist views, because he earlier said (as far as I know, truly) that the Guelphs supported the Pope while the Ghibellines supported the Emperor. SERIOUSLY, SIR, WHAT. *rubs temples*
* More interestingly imo, Wiki tells me that in 2008 the city council of Florence finally rescinded Dante's sentence of exile for being an unrepentant White Guelph. He can now return to his home city without being executed for never paying the fine they assessed against him over 700 years ago. However, his corpse remains in Ravenna. See, that's the kind of stuff you want to put in a history book: funny, memorable, and totally true. ;P
* I'm not even going to comment in detail on the melodramatic account of Dante's homeless wanderings until his death in the dreary ruins of Ravenna, or on the specific emotional whatsits that reportedly moved him to write the Divina Commedia. It has been shown often enough that when someone's real motivations can be figured out from history, they are not what Mr van Loon says they were, and half the time the motivations Mr van Loon asserts don't even make sense. Next up: Petrarch!
* I know zip about Petrarch. What I'm getting from this, under the floweriness, is that he did retellings of Roman authors in Italian and was renowned for it. TO THE WIKIMOBILE! ...um. XD
* Oooookay. According to Wiki, Petrarch was the son of one of Dante's friends; he studied law for seven years at his dad's wish, but hated it. While working as a clerk - no, a cleric - in Avignon (supporting the Avignon Papacy), he wrote an epic - heh, an UNFINISHED epic? (this Wiki article is all out of order) - in Latin about Scipio Africanus, as well as other things, and became a celebrity. In 1341 he was crowned the first poet laureate since antiquity. He is now best known for his Italian poetry but preferred Latin and did most of his work in that tongue. He also reportedly invented the concept of the "Dark Ages" from which, in his opinion, Europe was just emerging... awww, snotty little baby Renaissance man. *patpat*
* Petrarch is considered the first of the great "Renaissance men"; Wiki and van Loon agree on that much, anyway.
* ...what on earth are you doing putting the virtuous pagans in Dante's Purgatory, Mr van Loon. WHAT. ON. EARTH. The virtuous pagans are in Limbo! Everybody in Purgatory and Heaven is Christians! This is a rule. (Or it was in Dante's time, anyway. These days we have the concept of "invincible ignorance", i.e.: if you lived before Christ or for other reasons had no possible way of becoming a Christian, as for instance if you lived in South America before 1492, AND if you were a good person by whatever rules your society / religion had, you can go to heaven. I was rather amused last year to hear a Muslim girl in a hijab earnestly explaining the exact same thing to a friend, with the necessary variations for "if you weren't a Muslim" through no fault of your own etc.)
* OH LOL I CANNOT EVEN FOREVER. Okay, he's introducing the Renaissance "craze" for all things Greek and Roman, and he starts by referring to the crazes of his own time for bicycles and automobiles. He snarks very cleverly at them, too, although seeing the word "flivver" capitalized and in then-modern usage does amuse me a lot. "Explorers penetrate the hearts of unknown countries that they may find new supplies of gas", says Mr van Loon, and I do not deny it. (Explorers are STILL doing that. Oil geology is a booming industry, and if you're good at finding oil you can retire rich very young.) But then...
* ...oh, then. The next sentence is "Forests arise in Sumatra and in the Congo to supply us with rubber." Which is STRICTLY true! And indeed, it deserves to be expanded upon, as the 1950s "how they make rubber" books with which I am familiar focus entirely on wild rubber trees in the Amazon jungle. (So I will expand, quoting Wiki: "In 1876, Henry Wickham gathered thousands of Para rubber tree seeds from Brazil, and these were germinated in Kew Gardens, England. The seedlings were then sent to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Indonesia, Singapore and British Malaya. Malaya (now Malaysia) was later to become the biggest producer of rubber. About 100 years ago, the Congo Free State in Africa was also a significant source of natural rubber latex, mostly gathered by forced labour.") But unless you're already familiar with the history of rubber farming in Asia and Africa, it sounds HILARIOUSLY Americocentric, like those people who used to say the buffalo herds were created so that the American pioneers would have an abundant food source in their Manifest Destiny expansion.
(Probably some people still say this. I don't want to know! I just... happen to be very familiar with the sorts of people who WOULD. ;P)
* I'm not even going to investigate the reasons for the fall of Constantinople to the Turks right now. I'm just not. Anything that involves Hendrik van Loon and the words "such wicked heretics" [as the Eastern or Orthodox / not!Roman Catholics] isn't worth it.
* HOWEVER. I am delighted and a little bit astounded to find a sudden bit of random actual Greek here. He talks about a Greek teacher called Chrysoloras (I know that doesn't mean Golden Lorax but I AM GOING TO PRETEND, because I'm that tired of this book), and how young men flocked to Florence to learn how to decline "paideyo, paideyeis, paideyei"... only those are my clumsy transliteration, because he writes them IN THE GREEK ALPHABET. I kinda love that he lived in a world where this is a kid's book, just for this particular part of it. Here, have some Greek! Ask your teacher what it means if you can't read it yet. *g*)
* (I do know that "paideyo" etc mean "to learn" etc. I learned this from the National Spelling Bee practice booklet, which from 1994 to... whenever they went PDF-only... was called "Paideia", with an etymology in the back of the booklet. But I had to look up what on earth a lowercase upsilon even was, never mind what sound it made; in modern Greek it actually makes an "i" sound according to Wiki, but I went with the ancient "y" because that was just too many ei's in a row. ;P)
* Savonarola! With quite a sympathetic paragraph about his motivations and how he was just in the wrong century - once he's been safely burned. ;-)
* New chapter, about all the artistic expression people did with "Their Newly Discovered Joy Of Living". The back of the book tells me Mr van Loon's proper specialty is art - I might have said that before - so this might be a bit better than average.
* I don't know what Thomas a Kempis has to do with it? Oh, I see... we're transitioning to the middle of the Renaissance, 1471, in the lead-up to the Reformation.
* He speaks sympathetically if briefly of the "last sally" of the Middle Ages, with monasteries reforming and so forth, but declares that "the days of quiet meditation were gone". Oh so deterministic, Mr van Loon.
* This paragraph on the long words he must use, "expression" and "Renaissance" and so forth, is quite well done; he compares history to geometry, in which you need words like "hypotenuse" to say what you mean accurately, and why not start learning the ones for history now? :-) But he also remarks - which may have been true at the time - that you cannot write a book on geometry without "hypotenuse", "triangles", and... "rectangular parallelopiped". I don't know what it is, but it needed to be put here. :D
* (I wiki'd it. In my day they called those "solids" or "prisms" with appropriate adjectives. I can't blame them, but I am also a little bit sad. PARALLELEPIPED. XD)
* OH ROFLOL. I know he isn't strictly right that Michaelangelo "found the brush and the palette too soft for his strong hands" (it's clear this is meant literally), but it's still an amazing image he gives. He should have written something besides history, something he couldn't get wrong. I don't say his character motivations would be any good, BUT THE WRITING.
* Gutenberg! Hi Gutenberg! You seem to get away with your history intact. :-)
* Ooh, who is... wait, WHAT? Mr van Loon refers to an "Elzevier of Haarlem" who printed cheap editions of good books. I Wiki "Elzevier" and find a modern Dutch publishing company with (it says) no relationship to the original Dutch publisher, so I follow that link... and find Lodewijk Elzevir (his first name is the Dutch form of Ludwig, iirc - the "ij" is pronounced like "y"), a famous Dutch printing-house founder who published - among other things - Galileo's works while those were suppressed. :D Go you, Elzevir. HOWEVER! Mr Elzevir was born in Antwerp, moved to Douai and then to Leiden, and as far as Wiki seems to know, never lived in Haarlem at all! I don't even. WHAT. I at least expect my Dutch history to be right in this book! o_O
* "But Now That People Had Broken Through The Bonds Of Their Narrow Medieval Limitations, They Had To Have More Room For Their Wanderings. The European World Had Grown Too Small For Their Ambitions. It Was The Time Of The Great Voyages Of Discovery". Helloooo colonialism time! :P
* ...I really don't think Roger Bacon kept his discovery of microbes to himself. Am I confusing him with somebody else? Ooh, are we going to have Leeuwenhoek and the microscope?
* Anyway. The proper point of these couple pages is how horribly hard and nasty sea voyages were, also scurvy, and therefore most sailors were - um, I was with you up to the specifics, Mr van Loon - "ex-jailbirds, future murderers, and pickpockets out of a job". The jailbirds I'm fine with; the FUTURE murderers, never. And I'd like to know how a pickpocket falls out of a job. ;-)
* The pictures are still the best part of this book. Here is a darling flat-earth-vs-round-Earth map titled "How The World Grew Larger".
* Oh bweeeee. I have found out what is the problem. He wishes he could expand on all these fascinating things! "But history, to give you a true idea of past times, should be like those etchings which Rembrandt used to make. It should cast a vivid light on certain important causes, on those which are best and greatest. All the rest should be left in the shadow or should be indicated by a few lines." I agree that making the book a thousand pages long, as he says he wishes he could do, WOULD NOT HELP ANY... but I cannot agree with the principle here! :P We have a permanent disagreement, Mynheer van Loon. History, in my view, should be like the game I was playing the other day where you turn over one tile of a "Pitch-Black Cellar" board at a time and do the puzzle on the reverse, the goal being to find something hidden under a particular tile (a different one each time) but also to illuminate the whole cellar.
Admittedly, this is a particular book for children. He can't include everything, and I understand he's trying to explain why he doesn't include everything. But given that he's MISSTATING FACTS in order to cast a stronger light on the lessons he wants to teach... he's still wrong. :P
* Er. "Negus" is Ethiopian for king? *double-checks* I don't like you anymore, whichever-Star-Trek-writer-titled-the-Ferengi-ruler-"Grand-Nagus". :P (For those who don't follow Star Trek, the Ferengi are one of the more odious alien races on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine", known mostly for being very greedy and misogynistic. And short.)
* This is a very interesting story, whether or not it's true, about one "Pedro de Covilham" who travelled through Egypt to Aden, thence to Goa and Calicut (not the same place as Calcutta; I didn't know that before!), then secretly to Mecca and Medina - that's the part that makes me dubious - and to Ethiopia, where according to Mr van Loon he identified "Prester John" as the Christian king/s of Ethiopia (van Loon calls it "Abyssinia").
* At least he's telling truly that "the most intelligent people of that day" knew the earth was round, and citing Copernicus with the theory of heliocentrism, though... he admits that De Revolutionibus wasn't published until 1543, nor even started till 1507? O_O And of COOOOOURSE he plays up the "OMG Inquisition! Copernicus did not dare publish till the year of his death!" angle, failing to mention that dear old Nicolaus was a Catholic cleric in good standing. EVERYBODY neglects that little tidbit.
* So. To Wiki I go again. Copernicus only even ENTERED the Jagiellonian University (then the University of Krakow) in 1491! He was then eighteen years old. He did not graduate; after four years he received a canonry (a minor rank in the church, below priest but above deacon, which went in this case with a living), but for unknown reasons went to Bologna to study law before being installed by proxy as canon. It is uncertain whether he was ordained a priest or merely received minor orders. He also studied medicine for two years before eventually receiving his law degree... I'm starting to crack up here. KNOW ALL THE THINGS, this is our Copernicus. He wrote so many languages so fluently we don't even know which was his native one for sure! :D
Sometime before 1514 Copernicus wrote, but did not publish, an outline for his work on heliocentrism. He did, however, hand it round among friends, and copies survive; it doesn't include any of the maths for De Revolutionibus, and some of the geometrical theory is different. By 1532 he had finished De Revolutionibus, but was reluctant to publish, claiming he feared POPULAR mockage. However, he didn't try to conceal the basic theory; a Vatican secretary delivered lectures in Rome on the idea, interesting the Pope and several Catholic cardinals. At least one of them wrote to him asking him to publish. He was also friendly with Protestants, and let a Wittenberg mathematician publish a summary of his theory which was well received. He finally agreed to have De Revolutionibus published, but died of a paralytic stroke before that happened. (An unconfirmed story says he awoke from his last coma long enough to have the first advance copy placed in his hands, which is probably a little bit too adorable to be true.)
The first notable people recorded as speaking against Copernicanism are Martin Luther and other famous Protestants of the day; members of the Catholic Church did not officially pronounce against it till 1613 (I'm still getting all this from Wiki), when Cardinal Robert Bellarmine denied it on theological grounds, taking the Bible as literal. De Revolutionibus was made a Banned Book in 1616, and in 1633 Galileo was convicted of "grave suspicion of heresy" for publicly holding its theories. (Good to know. I was always taught that his conviction for heresy was completely unrelated to his heliocentrism, because ONOES the Church could not be Wrong about something so important! but Wiki cites the original condemnation.)
The 1758 Index of Forbidden Books dropped the general prohibition of works defending heliocentrism, but De Revolutionibus and Galileo's Two Systems were not removed till 1835. So much for the history of Copernicanism and Christianity.
...No, there's one more footnote. Copernicus and Kepler, in the liturgical calendar of the USA Episcopal Church, share a feast day on May 23. :D That is delightful and I am pleased.
* I could seriously do sections that long on ALL THE THINGS, which is why this is part five of the liveblog already. ;-) Onward!
* Do we now think that Columbus actually went to Iceland? (Van Loon claims he "only" made it to the Faroe Islands north of Scotland, "which are cold enough in February to be mistaken for Iceland by any one". If that particular claim is true, it fits in pretty hilariously with Columbus's notoriously bad distance-estimation at sea! :D)
* ...every time I google anything this guy says I learn something I didn't know. He claims the Vinland settlement of Thorfinn Karlsefne (a follow-up to that of Leif Ericson) failed because of the "hostility of the Esquimaux", which made me go WHAT because I'm used to seeing the Skraellinger portrayed as - I don't know how to say it in a politically correct way. First Nations people from further south! Mohawks, Iroquois, Hurons, that kind of territory. I suppose it does depend on whether you're looking at the modern range of wine grapes or considering L'Anse aux Meadows (which wasn't discovered till 1960).
But I Wiki'd "skraeling" to make sure, and WHAT DO YOU KNOW. The term is first recorded as referring to the Inuit who moved into Greenland in the 1300s! It's applied to the Vinland natives by extension, in the sagas.
* Yadda yadda Columbus - at least he assumes you know the story and skips over it pretty quickly. Vasco da Gama, John and Sebastian Cabot, Amerigo Vespucci! (Hello Amerigo! WHAT DO YOU KNOW, SOME ACCURATE UP-TO-DATE RESEARCH AT LAST. In 1922, Amerigo Vespucci was just having his name cleared by new research, after being thought a fraud since 1850-ish. That's why late-1800s USian patriotic songs talk about "Columbia" instead of "America", btw; they weren't just being poetical, they wanted to straight-up rename the continents.)
* Not that van Loon mentions the new research or the controversy, but he does credit Vespucci with exploring the coast of Brazil, which he did. I have strong feelings about treating Copernicus and Vespucci properly, sorry. ;-)
* Balboa, Magellan - wow. Why on earth did I think Magellan sailed from Portugal? I mean, I knew he himself was Portuguese, but... the Guadalquivir river, whose mouth I knew he set sail from, is in Spain. O_O Point for you, Mr van Loon, making me google something I was wrong on. I wonder who's ahead? ;-)
* The starving sailors on Magellan's crossing of the Pacific did not chew pieces of sail "to still their gnawing hunger." They weren't stupid. They boiled the leather chafing-gear off the spars and ate that; it's got a much higher protein content, not to mention being DIGESTIBLE. ;P I suppose he figured it'd take too long to explain what chafing-gear was (short version: in The Olden Days we had not got Teflon or smooth-machined stainless steel, so we padded / protected things with oiled leather. Wheel bearings were made of it before ball-bearings, for instance. So were Things To Keep Ropes From Fraying onna boat. There you go.)
* He describes Pope Alexander VI Borgia as "the only avowed heathen" ever elected Pope, which is in line with the general 1922 view of Pope Alexander but is still coming it a little strong, I think; I can't find evidence either way (Wiki seems more interested in the machinations of his son Cesare), but certainly it would be awkward for a medieval pope to "avow" non-Christianity, and I suspect such a one wouldn't keep his power long.
* I was rather baffled by Mr van Loon's claim that "stocks and bonds went down 40 and 50 percent" on the Venetian Rialto (the "Wall Street of the Middle Ages") when Columbus reported discovering Cathay, because I had no idea securities trading markets are that old. But apparently they are! Government securities were traded in Venice from the mid-13th century onward. ...I still don't know if we have the actual trading records from 1493. *g*
* HAHA prescient. Sort of. Okay, he's doing another big overview of (White People's) Civilization So Far, and he remarks that some people thought WWI, reducing the political power of the European nations, would cause the Pacific to become the next big center of world affairs, as the Atlantic had followed the Mediterranean when Columbus et al shifted Europe's attention westward. "But I doubt this", says van Loon. Well, WWI didn't do it, but WWII certainly helped; the Cold War slowed it down a bit, but at least in terms of commerce, the Pacific is definitely the important sea these days, with the US importing stuff from China and Japan and Malaysia etc etc.
* You can tell I'm a sailing ship geek because I went totally *headdesk* over his contrasting the "square-rigged" ships of the Spanish and Portuguese with the better "full-rigged" ships of the English and (of course) Dutch. In proper sailing lingo - at least, as of the '30s and '40s when the books I learned from were published - a "full-rigged" sailing ship is one with square rigging on all masts. (A "ship" is technically only a three-masted square-rigged vessel. Sorry, I'll cut this off before we get another History Of Copernicus going in here... *g*) The other option is "fore-and-aft rigging", sometimes called "schooner rigging", in which one edge of the sail rather than the middle is attached to the mast. The most versatile sailing vessels have a mix of both types of sails. But Elizabethan England isn't my particular hobby-horse, so I can't tell you exactly what made the English / Dutch ships different from or better than their Spanish / Portuguese competitors, if indeed they were better. (I've heard that asserted by our current Dutch author and various accounts of Francis Drake's Awesome Englishness, neither of which I really trust for accuracy. ;P)
* Hm, he's claiming that the next big centre of civilisation won't be an ocean at all, because it will depend on the development of aircraft. He's got a point.
Halfway point! The next chapter looks to be taking us Eastward to talk about Buddha and Confucius for a bit, so I'll cut this off here... good grief. I talked that long about only thirty-odd pages? I'm going to be here FOREVER. AND A DAY. O_O
ETA: No I'm not. I flipped forward to look at the chapters about WWI, because their titles are uncommunicative, and ran across this paragraph near the end of the book:
"A Zulu in a frock-coat is still a Zulu. A dog trained to ride a bicycle and smoke a pipe is still a dog. And a human being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman driving a 1921 Rolls Royce is still a human being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman."
He's trying to explain World War I happening, which is an admirable if futile enterprise... but I gave you three chances not to be casually racist above and beyond the demands of whatever your publisher wanted, Hendrik Willem van Loon. You just blew the last one. I'm out of here (except for the review).
I don't say The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle is going to be any BETTER, but at least I won't have to fact-check it! O_O
This book has taken me over a month to review. Admittedly, part of that was being on official hiatus, but part of it was just... this is a very dense book. It's got a lot of references I don't know anything about; my search history has probably hit the point where anyone who subpoenaed it would just be utterly perplexed. (Not that it was ever very incriminating. The basic stew of "[contact info/hours/address for X]", "what time should i go to bed calculator", and "muffaletta" has just been spiced up a bit by the addition of "venice council of ten", "milled coins history", "otto emperor" etc.)
Anyway. ENTER THE RENAISSANCE!
* Leeeeet me just re-quote that chapter heading: "People Once More Dared To Be Happy Just Because They Were Alive. They Tried To Save The Remains Of The Older And More Agreeable Civilisation Of Rome And Greece" etc etc. I don't know! It just... makes me lol.
* He is trying very hard NOT to draw history in broad sweeping strokes! Here, for instance, he mocks the idea of sudden switching between eras (again). People, he says, "think of the Middle Ages as a period of darkness and ignorance. 'Click!' says the clock, and the Renaissance begins and cities and palaces are flooded with the bright sunlight of an eager intellectual curiosity." Which is followed, it looks like, by an encomium on the High Middle Ages... but he already lost me by dissing Albert the Great. :P
* Haha! He draws a picture, amusing even if not accurate (I don't know if it is or not, and I feel it necessary to disclaim this stuff now), of the burghers of City Hall struggling against their feudal masters, of the guildsmen fighting with City Hall, and then... "The king and his shrewd advisers went fishing in these troubled waters and caught many a shining bass of profit which they proceeded to cook and eat before the noses of the surprised and disappointed councillors and guild brethren." BWAHAHAHAHA. It really is a worthwhile book to read if you like good turns of phrase and ranting about bad history! :D It just isn't what I signed up for. At all. Wow.
* He also says fairly accurately that the Middle Ages were "internationally minded". (Like most other things he says, I doubt it's COMPLETELY true - when do I get to read Trumpeter of Krakow? *checks* 1929, yay! I thought of it because there's a scene where gangs of young men from different regions of Europe get in a fight. OTOH, it's 15th century iirc.) But he explains it well, the loyalty to your little town rather than to a "nation", and Latin as the universal language of learning allowing someone like Erasmus of Rotterdam - oh, you go, Mr van Loon, get that Dutch history in there at every opportunity! ;-) - to reach a worldwide audience without needing translation out of Dutch and into twenty other languages.
* (I want to find out now when English became the universal language of commerce. It still isn't the universal language of learning, as I am finding out. *g*)
* OH BWAHAHA he has so many good sections! He well and truly sporks the modern way of founding a university all from scratch in a lump, with the teachers hired last, instead of the university growing from "o hai, Respected Wise Man, teach me your wisdom!" and then later - as he also describes - "oh pfft, I don't have to teach in the same place as THAT JERK anymore, I'mma go found Oxford kthxbai". *g* (Lolspeak mine.)
* Hello Dante! I did not know Dante was so early. I always put him in the 1400s, but he was born in 1265 according to this. Cool. (Oh, I see; he wrote the Divine Comedy in the 1300s, which literary people call "the fourteenth century", that's how I got confused.)
* Wait, did Dante really switch his allegiance from the Guelphs to the Ghibellines? NO WONDER everybody was mad at him (if this is true)! *pokes Wiki*
* NO HE DIDN'T. There was a split among the Guelphs and Dante was a White Guelph, while the Black Guelphs took power in Florence. Mr van Loon is just using the "Dante became a Ghibelline!" claim to support his own imperialist views, because he earlier said (as far as I know, truly) that the Guelphs supported the Pope while the Ghibellines supported the Emperor. SERIOUSLY, SIR, WHAT. *rubs temples*
* More interestingly imo, Wiki tells me that in 2008 the city council of Florence finally rescinded Dante's sentence of exile for being an unrepentant White Guelph. He can now return to his home city without being executed for never paying the fine they assessed against him over 700 years ago. However, his corpse remains in Ravenna. See, that's the kind of stuff you want to put in a history book: funny, memorable, and totally true. ;P
* I'm not even going to comment in detail on the melodramatic account of Dante's homeless wanderings until his death in the dreary ruins of Ravenna, or on the specific emotional whatsits that reportedly moved him to write the Divina Commedia. It has been shown often enough that when someone's real motivations can be figured out from history, they are not what Mr van Loon says they were, and half the time the motivations Mr van Loon asserts don't even make sense. Next up: Petrarch!
* I know zip about Petrarch. What I'm getting from this, under the floweriness, is that he did retellings of Roman authors in Italian and was renowned for it. TO THE WIKIMOBILE! ...um. XD
* Oooookay. According to Wiki, Petrarch was the son of one of Dante's friends; he studied law for seven years at his dad's wish, but hated it. While working as a clerk - no, a cleric - in Avignon (supporting the Avignon Papacy), he wrote an epic - heh, an UNFINISHED epic? (this Wiki article is all out of order) - in Latin about Scipio Africanus, as well as other things, and became a celebrity. In 1341 he was crowned the first poet laureate since antiquity. He is now best known for his Italian poetry but preferred Latin and did most of his work in that tongue. He also reportedly invented the concept of the "Dark Ages" from which, in his opinion, Europe was just emerging... awww, snotty little baby Renaissance man. *patpat*
* Petrarch is considered the first of the great "Renaissance men"; Wiki and van Loon agree on that much, anyway.
* ...what on earth are you doing putting the virtuous pagans in Dante's Purgatory, Mr van Loon. WHAT. ON. EARTH. The virtuous pagans are in Limbo! Everybody in Purgatory and Heaven is Christians! This is a rule. (Or it was in Dante's time, anyway. These days we have the concept of "invincible ignorance", i.e.: if you lived before Christ or for other reasons had no possible way of becoming a Christian, as for instance if you lived in South America before 1492, AND if you were a good person by whatever rules your society / religion had, you can go to heaven. I was rather amused last year to hear a Muslim girl in a hijab earnestly explaining the exact same thing to a friend, with the necessary variations for "if you weren't a Muslim" through no fault of your own etc.)
* OH LOL I CANNOT EVEN FOREVER. Okay, he's introducing the Renaissance "craze" for all things Greek and Roman, and he starts by referring to the crazes of his own time for bicycles and automobiles. He snarks very cleverly at them, too, although seeing the word "flivver" capitalized and in then-modern usage does amuse me a lot. "Explorers penetrate the hearts of unknown countries that they may find new supplies of gas", says Mr van Loon, and I do not deny it. (Explorers are STILL doing that. Oil geology is a booming industry, and if you're good at finding oil you can retire rich very young.) But then...
* ...oh, then. The next sentence is "Forests arise in Sumatra and in the Congo to supply us with rubber." Which is STRICTLY true! And indeed, it deserves to be expanded upon, as the 1950s "how they make rubber" books with which I am familiar focus entirely on wild rubber trees in the Amazon jungle. (So I will expand, quoting Wiki: "In 1876, Henry Wickham gathered thousands of Para rubber tree seeds from Brazil, and these were germinated in Kew Gardens, England. The seedlings were then sent to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Indonesia, Singapore and British Malaya. Malaya (now Malaysia) was later to become the biggest producer of rubber. About 100 years ago, the Congo Free State in Africa was also a significant source of natural rubber latex, mostly gathered by forced labour.") But unless you're already familiar with the history of rubber farming in Asia and Africa, it sounds HILARIOUSLY Americocentric, like those people who used to say the buffalo herds were created so that the American pioneers would have an abundant food source in their Manifest Destiny expansion.
(Probably some people still say this. I don't want to know! I just... happen to be very familiar with the sorts of people who WOULD. ;P)
* I'm not even going to investigate the reasons for the fall of Constantinople to the Turks right now. I'm just not. Anything that involves Hendrik van Loon and the words "such wicked heretics" [as the Eastern or Orthodox / not!Roman Catholics] isn't worth it.
* HOWEVER. I am delighted and a little bit astounded to find a sudden bit of random actual Greek here. He talks about a Greek teacher called Chrysoloras (I know that doesn't mean Golden Lorax but I AM GOING TO PRETEND, because I'm that tired of this book), and how young men flocked to Florence to learn how to decline "paideyo, paideyeis, paideyei"... only those are my clumsy transliteration, because he writes them IN THE GREEK ALPHABET. I kinda love that he lived in a world where this is a kid's book, just for this particular part of it. Here, have some Greek! Ask your teacher what it means if you can't read it yet. *g*)
* (I do know that "paideyo" etc mean "to learn" etc. I learned this from the National Spelling Bee practice booklet, which from 1994 to... whenever they went PDF-only... was called "Paideia", with an etymology in the back of the booklet. But I had to look up what on earth a lowercase upsilon even was, never mind what sound it made; in modern Greek it actually makes an "i" sound according to Wiki, but I went with the ancient "y" because that was just too many ei's in a row. ;P)
* Savonarola! With quite a sympathetic paragraph about his motivations and how he was just in the wrong century - once he's been safely burned. ;-)
* New chapter, about all the artistic expression people did with "Their Newly Discovered Joy Of Living". The back of the book tells me Mr van Loon's proper specialty is art - I might have said that before - so this might be a bit better than average.
* I don't know what Thomas a Kempis has to do with it? Oh, I see... we're transitioning to the middle of the Renaissance, 1471, in the lead-up to the Reformation.
* He speaks sympathetically if briefly of the "last sally" of the Middle Ages, with monasteries reforming and so forth, but declares that "the days of quiet meditation were gone". Oh so deterministic, Mr van Loon.
* This paragraph on the long words he must use, "expression" and "Renaissance" and so forth, is quite well done; he compares history to geometry, in which you need words like "hypotenuse" to say what you mean accurately, and why not start learning the ones for history now? :-) But he also remarks - which may have been true at the time - that you cannot write a book on geometry without "hypotenuse", "triangles", and... "rectangular parallelopiped". I don't know what it is, but it needed to be put here. :D
* (I wiki'd it. In my day they called those "solids" or "prisms" with appropriate adjectives. I can't blame them, but I am also a little bit sad. PARALLELEPIPED. XD)
* OH ROFLOL. I know he isn't strictly right that Michaelangelo "found the brush and the palette too soft for his strong hands" (it's clear this is meant literally), but it's still an amazing image he gives. He should have written something besides history, something he couldn't get wrong. I don't say his character motivations would be any good, BUT THE WRITING.
* Gutenberg! Hi Gutenberg! You seem to get away with your history intact. :-)
* Ooh, who is... wait, WHAT? Mr van Loon refers to an "Elzevier of Haarlem" who printed cheap editions of good books. I Wiki "Elzevier" and find a modern Dutch publishing company with (it says) no relationship to the original Dutch publisher, so I follow that link... and find Lodewijk Elzevir (his first name is the Dutch form of Ludwig, iirc - the "ij" is pronounced like "y"), a famous Dutch printing-house founder who published - among other things - Galileo's works while those were suppressed. :D Go you, Elzevir. HOWEVER! Mr Elzevir was born in Antwerp, moved to Douai and then to Leiden, and as far as Wiki seems to know, never lived in Haarlem at all! I don't even. WHAT. I at least expect my Dutch history to be right in this book! o_O
* "But Now That People Had Broken Through The Bonds Of Their Narrow Medieval Limitations, They Had To Have More Room For Their Wanderings. The European World Had Grown Too Small For Their Ambitions. It Was The Time Of The Great Voyages Of Discovery". Helloooo colonialism time! :P
* ...I really don't think Roger Bacon kept his discovery of microbes to himself. Am I confusing him with somebody else? Ooh, are we going to have Leeuwenhoek and the microscope?
* Anyway. The proper point of these couple pages is how horribly hard and nasty sea voyages were, also scurvy, and therefore most sailors were - um, I was with you up to the specifics, Mr van Loon - "ex-jailbirds, future murderers, and pickpockets out of a job". The jailbirds I'm fine with; the FUTURE murderers, never. And I'd like to know how a pickpocket falls out of a job. ;-)
* The pictures are still the best part of this book. Here is a darling flat-earth-vs-round-Earth map titled "How The World Grew Larger".
* Oh bweeeee. I have found out what is the problem. He wishes he could expand on all these fascinating things! "But history, to give you a true idea of past times, should be like those etchings which Rembrandt used to make. It should cast a vivid light on certain important causes, on those which are best and greatest. All the rest should be left in the shadow or should be indicated by a few lines." I agree that making the book a thousand pages long, as he says he wishes he could do, WOULD NOT HELP ANY... but I cannot agree with the principle here! :P We have a permanent disagreement, Mynheer van Loon. History, in my view, should be like the game I was playing the other day where you turn over one tile of a "Pitch-Black Cellar" board at a time and do the puzzle on the reverse, the goal being to find something hidden under a particular tile (a different one each time) but also to illuminate the whole cellar.
Admittedly, this is a particular book for children. He can't include everything, and I understand he's trying to explain why he doesn't include everything. But given that he's MISSTATING FACTS in order to cast a stronger light on the lessons he wants to teach... he's still wrong. :P
* Er. "Negus" is Ethiopian for king? *double-checks* I don't like you anymore, whichever-Star-Trek-writer-titled-the-Ferengi-ruler-"Grand-Nagus". :P (For those who don't follow Star Trek, the Ferengi are one of the more odious alien races on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine", known mostly for being very greedy and misogynistic. And short.)
* This is a very interesting story, whether or not it's true, about one "Pedro de Covilham" who travelled through Egypt to Aden, thence to Goa and Calicut (not the same place as Calcutta; I didn't know that before!), then secretly to Mecca and Medina - that's the part that makes me dubious - and to Ethiopia, where according to Mr van Loon he identified "Prester John" as the Christian king/s of Ethiopia (van Loon calls it "Abyssinia").
* At least he's telling truly that "the most intelligent people of that day" knew the earth was round, and citing Copernicus with the theory of heliocentrism, though... he admits that De Revolutionibus wasn't published until 1543, nor even started till 1507? O_O And of COOOOOURSE he plays up the "OMG Inquisition! Copernicus did not dare publish till the year of his death!" angle, failing to mention that dear old Nicolaus was a Catholic cleric in good standing. EVERYBODY neglects that little tidbit.
* So. To Wiki I go again. Copernicus only even ENTERED the Jagiellonian University (then the University of Krakow) in 1491! He was then eighteen years old. He did not graduate; after four years he received a canonry (a minor rank in the church, below priest but above deacon, which went in this case with a living), but for unknown reasons went to Bologna to study law before being installed by proxy as canon. It is uncertain whether he was ordained a priest or merely received minor orders. He also studied medicine for two years before eventually receiving his law degree... I'm starting to crack up here. KNOW ALL THE THINGS, this is our Copernicus. He wrote so many languages so fluently we don't even know which was his native one for sure! :D
Sometime before 1514 Copernicus wrote, but did not publish, an outline for his work on heliocentrism. He did, however, hand it round among friends, and copies survive; it doesn't include any of the maths for De Revolutionibus, and some of the geometrical theory is different. By 1532 he had finished De Revolutionibus, but was reluctant to publish, claiming he feared POPULAR mockage. However, he didn't try to conceal the basic theory; a Vatican secretary delivered lectures in Rome on the idea, interesting the Pope and several Catholic cardinals. At least one of them wrote to him asking him to publish. He was also friendly with Protestants, and let a Wittenberg mathematician publish a summary of his theory which was well received. He finally agreed to have De Revolutionibus published, but died of a paralytic stroke before that happened. (An unconfirmed story says he awoke from his last coma long enough to have the first advance copy placed in his hands, which is probably a little bit too adorable to be true.)
The first notable people recorded as speaking against Copernicanism are Martin Luther and other famous Protestants of the day; members of the Catholic Church did not officially pronounce against it till 1613 (I'm still getting all this from Wiki), when Cardinal Robert Bellarmine denied it on theological grounds, taking the Bible as literal. De Revolutionibus was made a Banned Book in 1616, and in 1633 Galileo was convicted of "grave suspicion of heresy" for publicly holding its theories. (Good to know. I was always taught that his conviction for heresy was completely unrelated to his heliocentrism, because ONOES the Church could not be Wrong about something so important! but Wiki cites the original condemnation.)
The 1758 Index of Forbidden Books dropped the general prohibition of works defending heliocentrism, but De Revolutionibus and Galileo's Two Systems were not removed till 1835. So much for the history of Copernicanism and Christianity.
...No, there's one more footnote. Copernicus and Kepler, in the liturgical calendar of the USA Episcopal Church, share a feast day on May 23. :D That is delightful and I am pleased.
* I could seriously do sections that long on ALL THE THINGS, which is why this is part five of the liveblog already. ;-) Onward!
* Do we now think that Columbus actually went to Iceland? (Van Loon claims he "only" made it to the Faroe Islands north of Scotland, "which are cold enough in February to be mistaken for Iceland by any one". If that particular claim is true, it fits in pretty hilariously with Columbus's notoriously bad distance-estimation at sea! :D)
* ...every time I google anything this guy says I learn something I didn't know. He claims the Vinland settlement of Thorfinn Karlsefne (a follow-up to that of Leif Ericson) failed because of the "hostility of the Esquimaux", which made me go WHAT because I'm used to seeing the Skraellinger portrayed as - I don't know how to say it in a politically correct way. First Nations people from further south! Mohawks, Iroquois, Hurons, that kind of territory. I suppose it does depend on whether you're looking at the modern range of wine grapes or considering L'Anse aux Meadows (which wasn't discovered till 1960).
But I Wiki'd "skraeling" to make sure, and WHAT DO YOU KNOW. The term is first recorded as referring to the Inuit who moved into Greenland in the 1300s! It's applied to the Vinland natives by extension, in the sagas.
* Yadda yadda Columbus - at least he assumes you know the story and skips over it pretty quickly. Vasco da Gama, John and Sebastian Cabot, Amerigo Vespucci! (Hello Amerigo! WHAT DO YOU KNOW, SOME ACCURATE UP-TO-DATE RESEARCH AT LAST. In 1922, Amerigo Vespucci was just having his name cleared by new research, after being thought a fraud since 1850-ish. That's why late-1800s USian patriotic songs talk about "Columbia" instead of "America", btw; they weren't just being poetical, they wanted to straight-up rename the continents.)
* Not that van Loon mentions the new research or the controversy, but he does credit Vespucci with exploring the coast of Brazil, which he did. I have strong feelings about treating Copernicus and Vespucci properly, sorry. ;-)
* Balboa, Magellan - wow. Why on earth did I think Magellan sailed from Portugal? I mean, I knew he himself was Portuguese, but... the Guadalquivir river, whose mouth I knew he set sail from, is in Spain. O_O Point for you, Mr van Loon, making me google something I was wrong on. I wonder who's ahead? ;-)
* The starving sailors on Magellan's crossing of the Pacific did not chew pieces of sail "to still their gnawing hunger." They weren't stupid. They boiled the leather chafing-gear off the spars and ate that; it's got a much higher protein content, not to mention being DIGESTIBLE. ;P I suppose he figured it'd take too long to explain what chafing-gear was (short version: in The Olden Days we had not got Teflon or smooth-machined stainless steel, so we padded / protected things with oiled leather. Wheel bearings were made of it before ball-bearings, for instance. So were Things To Keep Ropes From Fraying onna boat. There you go.)
* He describes Pope Alexander VI Borgia as "the only avowed heathen" ever elected Pope, which is in line with the general 1922 view of Pope Alexander but is still coming it a little strong, I think; I can't find evidence either way (Wiki seems more interested in the machinations of his son Cesare), but certainly it would be awkward for a medieval pope to "avow" non-Christianity, and I suspect such a one wouldn't keep his power long.
* I was rather baffled by Mr van Loon's claim that "stocks and bonds went down 40 and 50 percent" on the Venetian Rialto (the "Wall Street of the Middle Ages") when Columbus reported discovering Cathay, because I had no idea securities trading markets are that old. But apparently they are! Government securities were traded in Venice from the mid-13th century onward. ...I still don't know if we have the actual trading records from 1493. *g*
* HAHA prescient. Sort of. Okay, he's doing another big overview of (White People's) Civilization So Far, and he remarks that some people thought WWI, reducing the political power of the European nations, would cause the Pacific to become the next big center of world affairs, as the Atlantic had followed the Mediterranean when Columbus et al shifted Europe's attention westward. "But I doubt this", says van Loon. Well, WWI didn't do it, but WWII certainly helped; the Cold War slowed it down a bit, but at least in terms of commerce, the Pacific is definitely the important sea these days, with the US importing stuff from China and Japan and Malaysia etc etc.
* You can tell I'm a sailing ship geek because I went totally *headdesk* over his contrasting the "square-rigged" ships of the Spanish and Portuguese with the better "full-rigged" ships of the English and (of course) Dutch. In proper sailing lingo - at least, as of the '30s and '40s when the books I learned from were published - a "full-rigged" sailing ship is one with square rigging on all masts. (A "ship" is technically only a three-masted square-rigged vessel. Sorry, I'll cut this off before we get another History Of Copernicus going in here... *g*) The other option is "fore-and-aft rigging", sometimes called "schooner rigging", in which one edge of the sail rather than the middle is attached to the mast. The most versatile sailing vessels have a mix of both types of sails. But Elizabethan England isn't my particular hobby-horse, so I can't tell you exactly what made the English / Dutch ships different from or better than their Spanish / Portuguese competitors, if indeed they were better. (I've heard that asserted by our current Dutch author and various accounts of Francis Drake's Awesome Englishness, neither of which I really trust for accuracy. ;P)
* Hm, he's claiming that the next big centre of civilisation won't be an ocean at all, because it will depend on the development of aircraft. He's got a point.
Halfway point! The next chapter looks to be taking us Eastward to talk about Buddha and Confucius for a bit, so I'll cut this off here... good grief. I talked that long about only thirty-odd pages? I'm going to be here FOREVER. AND A DAY. O_O
ETA: No I'm not. I flipped forward to look at the chapters about WWI, because their titles are uncommunicative, and ran across this paragraph near the end of the book:
"A Zulu in a frock-coat is still a Zulu. A dog trained to ride a bicycle and smoke a pipe is still a dog. And a human being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman driving a 1921 Rolls Royce is still a human being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman."
He's trying to explain World War I happening, which is an admirable if futile enterprise... but I gave you three chances not to be casually racist above and beyond the demands of whatever your publisher wanted, Hendrik Willem van Loon. You just blew the last one. I'm out of here (except for the review).
I don't say The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle is going to be any BETTER, but at least I won't have to fact-check it! O_O
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Part 1 - Part 1a - Part 2
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