Month: March 2015

Sir Walter Raleigh (Raleigh Trevelyan)

This book not only illuminates Sir Walter Raleigh’s life, but also illuminates his times in a way that brings real benefit to the reader. The author, Raleigh Trevelyan (who died in 2014), does an excellent job of making Raleigh’s story compelling, maintaining focus on his protagonist while bringing in enough of the historical and political background to put Walter Raleigh in the context of his times. (Although if you don’t like poetry, you may not like frequent quotations of Raleigh’s poetry—but those also illuminate the points at hand, and so are well worth paying attention to.)

Understanding Arabs: A Contemporary Guide to Arab Society (Margaret Nydell)

Published by Charles Haywood

This is an awful book. It (the fifth edition, from 2012) contains a tiny bit of apparently useful information, which may or may not be true or generally applicable, combined with heaps of mendacious propaganda and annoying hectoring, padded out with material yanked from the likes of Wikipedia. If you’re relying on it to help you, say, understand Arabs, I doubt very much if it will do that. If you are looking for accurate historical information or informed commentary on Islam, a major focus of the book, you should run away as fast as you can.

The Vikings (Robert Ferguson)

Published by Charles Haywood

A relatively brief academic history–a bit dry in spots, or very dry if you’re looking for a popularized history. And not for you if you’re looking for a pseudo-history where women warriors fought alongside men and the fictitious Mother Goddess was worshiped until the eeeeevil Christians came along. No–in this book women don’t appear hardly at all, and calling a Christian priest homosexual in a poem results not in a Pride moment but in him hunting you down and killing you. But if you want to learn not just about the usual Viking raids in England, but the settlement of and life in Iceland and Greenland, along with many fascinating cultural details of Norse life, this is the book for you.

The Road To Mecca (Muhammad Asad)

Published by Charles Haywood

This is a fascinating book—half travelogue and half conversion memoir. Muhammad Asad was born a Jew, Leopold Weiss, in the Austro-Hungarian empire (in what is now Ukraine, the city of Lvov). He was prominent both in interactions with the West in the 20th Century, for example as Pakistani ambassador to the UN, and in theological work, including translation and exegesis of the Q’uran. Asad is regarded, and should be even more regarded in these days of Al Qaeda and ISIS, as a voice for a revitalized, mainstream (he would accurately reject the term “moderate”) Islam. But long before that, he was just a Westerner adrift and looking for spiritual answers.

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (Nicholas Wade)

Published by Charles Haywood

Whether this book is good or bad depends largely on what you expect it to be. If you expect it to be a cautious attempt to open up to discussion the subject of the existence of distinct races and genetic racial differences, and how those might affect social structures and institutions, you will think it is good. If you expect it to be a definitive proof of one interpretation or another of those same matters, you will think it is bad, for it is nothing of the sort. And, of course, if you are stuck in the old politically dictated paradigm that all differences among humans are purely random or cultural, and that “race is a social construct,” you will think it is mad, bad and dangerous to know.