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Class of 1957 Book Review Site. ©2007. To add a Book Review, or to comment on a book already in this listing, send your material or review to Sam Coulbourn at Persnav@shore.net. Photo at top of each page shows VADM C. Turner Joy (1895-1956). Joy was Commander Naval Forces Far East for most of the Korean War, presided over Armistice Talks with the North Koreans, and then came to Annapolis to serve as Superintendent. He was our Supe during our plebe year. Revised 3 August 2008. |
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HISTORY Guns, Germs, and Steel
By Jared Diamond, 1999. 496 pp. Trade paperback. Includes a 2003 Afterword.
Diamond leads us on a journey of 13,000 years, since the last Ice Age, across all the continents, as he answers the question which one could interpret to be quite racist: Why do the white Europeans do everything, know everything, have everything. Are they better than Africans… or American Indians? Is there a “master race”? The answer that Diamond develops over some 400 pages is “no.” It all started in what once was “The Fertile Crescent” – Mesopotamia, or the lush, green lands between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, and it all started with food production. As long as men the world over spent their lives as hunter-gatherers, things stayed fairly static. In the Fertile Crescent there were more crops that could and did get domesticated. There were more animals that the people could –and did—domesticate. Cultivating crops and raising animals for food, clothing, transportation and traction meant that men had to become sedentary. They had to settle down. In the land that is now the very fertile state of California, there just weren’t as many crops that could be domesticated, nor were there animals. The people of the Fertile Crescent got the head start on settling down, to become farmers, to develop communities, and states. This spread west to Europe, and east to Asia. Guns: Diamond tells about “The Collision at Cajamarca” in 1532, when the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizzaro and a ragtag group of 168 Spanish soldiers ran up against Atahuallpa, the absolute monarch of the Incas in the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca. Atahuallpa had 80,000 Indians all ready to do his bidding. In a narrative by one of the Spaniards on the scene that day, one said “Many of us urinated…. Out of sheer terror.” One hundred sixty-eight vs. 80,000 sounds like terror. However, the Spaniards fired their cannons, and rode their horses (the Indians had never seen horses), blew trumpets and created such a commotion that the Indians panicked, and the Spaniards killed thousands of Indians. The rest disappeared, and so Atahuallpa was captured, and the Spaniards were the victors. Germs: Populations that had developed, with large numbers living together, had evolved because they were survivors of various diseases. When these people arrived in the New World, for instance, the native populations had never been exposed to these diseases, and whole villages were wiped out. Spanish microbes decimated the population of native Americans. Steel: Diamond refers to Pizarro’s stunning victory at Cajamarca again, noting Pizarro’s military advantages lay in steel sweords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses. His enemy had only stone, bronze or wooden clubs, maces, hand axes, slingshots and quilted armor.
Review by Sam Coulbourn, February, 2007.
HISTORY The Scramble for Africa: The White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912
By Thomas Pakenham, 1991. New York, NY: Random House. 738 pp.
The Scramble for Africa starts with a journey of David Livingstone (1813-1873). Livingstone was a Scottish missionary who spent 30 years exploring Africa, from the Cape to the Equator, and was the first white man to see Victoria Falls, and the first white man to travel across the continent from west to east. Henry Stanley (1841-1904) was a different sort. On a trip sponsored by the New York Herald Tribune he spent a year searching for Livingstone, and found him just before the famed missionary died. At his request, natives cut out his heart and intestines, buried them in the jungle, under a mpundu tree, and dried out his remains like a cowhide, and shipped it back to London, to a fine funeral in Westminster Abbey. Stanley went on to make his own important discoveries in central Africa, and was a key player in the Scramble, which was a hell for leather race to see which European country could slice up Africa, and suck it dry of its wealth. Livingstone had advanced the idea of the 3 C’s—Commerce, Christianity and Civilization. King Leopold II (1835-1909) of Belgium was a major player in the Scramble, and this book devotes a lot of space to his exploits. Leopold had had his heart set on a colony or two for tiny Belgium for some time, and he managed to work his way between the two big colonial powers of the time, Britain and France, to win the Congo. He did this by hiring Stanley away from the British, and by some masterful diplomatic maneuvering and a solid con-job with Germany, France, Britain, and even President Chester Arthur of the United States. Leopold was masterful in selling the world on his love of these poor black brethren, helping to bring civilization and Christianity to them, mainly as a masterful philanthropy. What this master charlatan really did was squeeze copper, diamonds, gold, rubber and much more out of this rich heart of Africa, by using slave labor. He managed to co-opt the Christian missionaries in the Congo, so they were largely silent about all the atrocities they saw and heard about. Scramble for Africa does a wonderful job of telling the story of the slicing up of the African cake by greedy men from many nations, starting with the Phoenicians who established bases on the east coast 3000 years ago, followed by the Arabs and Chinese, and the Portuguese, who established bases on the western coast in the 15th century. The French staked out the west coast, led by a young Italian in the French Navy named Piere Savorgnan de Brazza, and Algiers, as well as a hand on Egypt; and the British were entrenched in Egypt, Sudan, South Africa and East Africa. The Spaniards had parts of the Western Sahara; the Ottoman Turks had Tunis, Tripoli and the Nile valley down to Lake Victoria. The Portuguese had Angola and Mozambique. Leopold’s masterly sleight-of-hand took place at the Berlin General Act of 1885, a hollowed-out, phony agreement between 30 nations that gave him license to acquire the Congo and start the process of exploiting men and land. Germany gained what is now Namibia and Tanzania, Cameroon and Togo. Italy gained Libya, Eritrea, Somaliland and for a short time, Ethiopia. The story of the Scramble for Africa is a story of enormous greed. It is ironic that the man that really kicked the scramble into high gear was a genuinely good man, David Livingstone. He exposed the horrors of the African slave trade in progress in the 1870s, and called for Africa to be redeemed by the three C’s….
Review by Sam Coulbourn, April, 2005. .
MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS Assassin's Gate, The: America in Iraq
By George Packer, 2005.
Recounts how we became involved in Iraq with in depth reporting on the Iraq exiles in the academic world and their influence on our policies. Packer, a liberal Democrat reporter For the New Yorker takes you behind the scenes in both Iraq and the U.S. and does a fairly good job of presenting what happened up until mid 2005.
MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS Because They Hate: A Survivor Of Islamic Terror Warns America
By Brigitte Gabriel, 2006.
It is an absorbing read by a Lebanese Christian Lady who went through the PLO/Syrian takeover of her country. Having met the general she refers to in the book in the 80's and observed 1st hand many of the traits of Arab Muslims that she describes, I am in agreement with everything she talks about in the book. Her childhood experience in Lebanon is a precursor of what can happen to western civilization one country at a time. A sobering read.
MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
By Stephen Kinzer, 2003.
A fascinating history of the American involvement in the secret overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953. This seldom told history partially explains the resentment of the Iranians to the United States and Britain. The book reads like a novel and Kinzer did a great job on researching what was going on as we were struggling with Plebe Summer.
MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS The Crisis of Islam
By Bernard Lewis, 2003.
A historical look at the roots of the Islamic World and the acts of terrorism that are being committed today. Lewis, a Professor at Princeton, has a firm grasp of both the Islamic Religion and what may inspire those who commit acts of terrorism today in the name of Islam.
MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps
MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS Reading Lolita in Tehran
By Nafar Nafisi, 2003.
Bernard Lewis said of this book, “A memoir about teaching western literature in revolutionary Iran, with profound and fascinating insights into both. A masterpiece.” The author, for a period of two years, met secretly every Thursday with seven of her female students in the professor’s apartment to study Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. Censorship and morality squads were the order of the day as the fundamentalists controlled the university, but Nafisi found a way to open the minds of her students to otherwise prohibited ideas. A most timely and perceptive analysis of the radical Islamic ideology and of the triumph of the human spirit.
Reviewed by Paul Roush.
MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS What Went Wrong: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East
By Bernard Lewis, 2002.
Lewis, a professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, attempts to explain “what went wrong” with Islam in its contention with Christendom as “a world faith and a world power.” He identifies social and cultural barriers to Muslim progress. He identifies Islamic barriers to modernity and social equality. He describes the “numerous restrictions and disabilities imposed by Muslim law and traditions on Christians,” and Jews as well, as dhimmis. And he notes “There is, for example, no distinction between canon law and civil law, between the law of the church and the law of the state, crucial in Christian history,” i.e., the supremacy of theocracy evident in Iran today. He observes that Muslims are more likely to ask, “Who did this to us?” (external influence) than “Where did we go wrong?” (self examination), suggesting a mind-set wherein a return to medieval Islam will consequently provide the recapture of Islamic glory. Lewis makes clear that the world once again faces a conflict between Islam and Christendom, the sword wielded against the cross, for world civil and spiritual hegemony. His perspective of the Islamic mind is well worth reading.
Review by Sam Coulbourn, September 2006.
MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS God's Terrorists; The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad
By Charles Allen, 2006.
This is a fascinating account of the migration of Islamic Puritanism of the Sunni Wahhabi cult originating in the central Arabian peninsula to the Indian subcontinent and beyond beginning in the early 19th century. The author, a noted Brit historian who has written extensively on British rule in India, was put on the trail of "Hindustani fanatics", actually Muslims, on a trip to Kabul through the Khyber Pass a few years ago researching the rise of the Taliban. Pulling the thread of Mullah Omar and the fanatics in the region he traced them back through India, Pakistan and Bangladesh establishing a genealogy, the likely family tree that can be traced to the first Wahabbi influence. He noted the uprisings and campaigns that occurred as the Brits attempted to rule--all attributed to "Hindustani fanatics"; 'wahabbees' were specifically identified in the 1850s, and the Deobandis, a wahabbi offshoot, a decade later. The author noted that Mullah Omar was educated in a madrassah; some 10,000 of these religious schools existed in Pakistan in 2002. Of the 1.7 million students, 1.25 million were receiving Deobandi-based or Ahl-i-Hadith (traditional Sunni) training. It's a fine read, but the tale is complex. I suggest tabbing the five chartlets before you begin, along with the appendices that include a glossary, key names and the family trees involved. In the charts, I struggled to identify locations early on, only to find them in charts later in the book. For those who have read the wonderful book: "The Great Game: the Struggle for Empire in Central Asia", by Peter Hopkirk, 1990, "God's Terrorists" is a good supplement that moves into this century.
MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS The Next Attack--The Globalization of Jihad
By Benjamin, Daniel and Simon, Stephen, 2005.
The authors, who both served in Clinton's National Security Council in the '90s, offer a knowledgeable assessment of the path that Islamists extremists have taken up through the London bombings last
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