Eastern University Books

molly tenenbaum's poems sparkle and dance in the half light and shadows of everyday cracks and crevices. from the smallest of spaces, she pulls out shining moments of laughter and wit, sadness and compassion, intelligence and grace. this is a book for dusk and twilight -- day's end when the events of the world seem too big and bruising, day's end when poems can restore a slender thread to sanity, a slight, but firm, connection to intimacy and reflection. it's a wonderful debut.

I picked up this book solely for the fact that it was a Byzantine book. I was not disappointed with the content, however. The book covers the following:
The poor:
The peasantry:
The Soldiers:
The Teachers:
Women:
Entrepreneurs:
Bishops:
Saints:
Emperors:
Functionaries:

The book also explains what sources were used and why when describing how these people lived. It does a good job contrasting these groups to their western and Islamic eastern counterparts. It offers a broad view of each group while also focusing in on particular time periods. The Book also has several authors so getting bogged down in a certain authors style is unlikely to happen and it give a chance to compare styles. I were to teach an introduction in Byzantine Studies, or an Overview course this book would be on my list.

Haldon's magnificent analytic history of seventh century Byzantium provides a compelling picture of a culture imbued with a sense of crisis and impending demise.
Not that surprising per se, remembering the devastating Persian wars, the Avars and Bulgars and most importantly, the cataclysmic arrival of the Arabs "robbing" Byzantium of well over 2/3 of their previous income!

However, Haldon's patient analysis is rewarding, and we see how these crises led to the degeneration of towns into mere refuge citadels, how the established senatorial class loses to a rising military buraucracy, how the strategy of a few, mobile field armies is abandoned in favour of a militarized countryside with local militiae, and how the church and state bureaucracies are, at times painfully, welded together.

The commissioned artworks bring out this mentality as well:
The surge in popularity for the icons, who by their compelling gaze and austere figures demand of the individual first and foremost, conformity and subservience.

It is definitely not a very "nice" culture Haldon describes, quite the opposite, but given the circumstances, the evolutions are quite understandable, and lucidly portrayed by him.

In addition, although I would have hated to live in seventh century Byzantium with its bigotry and impending doom-mentality, I cannot help myself from admiring their resourcefulness in weathering those disasters they were living through, even flourishing by the ninth and tenth century.

Haldon's ability to call forth such admiration from us, without any need to specify it, but only through vividly bring back for us a very alien culture is, at least to me, a major achievement on its own.

This is an excellently compiled collection of translated original source material regarding the Byzantine Empire. Here you can read about what the Byzantines thought about Byzantine. It's got wonderful sections about relations with the West, the Turks, Culture and Life, Politics, Christianity, etc. If you have any interest in Byzantine, you've got to get this book. Great for not only the serious scholar but the general reader as well. Don't rely on historians to translate history for you; Do it yourself

At a time when more and more postcolonial countries are leaning toward Islamic fundamentalism, this thoroughgoing study of the situation in Algeria puts the past and present in perspective. Recommended reading for anyone who is concerned about the future of the Third World.

It is a little known fact in the history of philosophy and ideas that many of the writings and principles that we have and consider as standard 'Western' products came to us through the Arabic traditions. In some cases, this was preservation of earlier materials (Aristotle is but the most famous example of this), but in others, the original product of the Arabic philosophers influenced mathematics, science, art, theology, and philosophy in the West in ways still being discovered.

This volume, edited by Peter Adamson and Richard Taylor, is an important contribution to re-establishing this connection and recovering lesser known traditions, as well as holding up the history of Arabic philosophy in its own right. The tradition of Arabic philosophy is almost as old as Islam itself, which established in its early days bright centres of learning and international communications that inspired a blossoming of ecumenical philosophical traditions cutting across Christian, Jewish and Muslim lines.

During the formative stage, the figure of Avicenna looms large, with his synthesis of falsafa (philosophy both Aristotelian and Neoplatonic) and kalam (Islamic doctrinal theology). The classical age of Arabic philosophy, in the ninth to twelfth centuries C.E., took advantage of their Aristotelian inheritance, preserved and commented upon by Averroes (Ibn Rushd), an Andalusian philosopher (think Spain). Other strands of thought, both more 'practical' and more mystical, are explored by the authors. Some chapters concentrate on particular time periods or historic figures, and others look more generally at topics in philosophy (logic, ethics, metaphysics, etc.) across the broader range of Islamic history.

There are also chapters on the relationship of Islamic philosophy with Jewish philosophy, with the translation (linguistic, political, theological and philosophical) into Latin, and modern trends in Islamic thought. Contributor Steven Harvey writes, 'It is not a coincidence that philosophy emerges in Islam and Judaism in the same period and in the same lands.' Many of the Jewish communities of the time were in Muslim lands; there was a large Jewish community still in Baghdad, one in Alexandria, and a growing community in Muslim-ruled Spain. Latin rulers in Europe occasionally encouraged multi-cultural connections, and in many places and times Arabic rather than Latin or Greek was the preferred 'intellectual' language, described by Charles Burnett. Finally, Hossein Ziai explores Arabic and Persian trends into philosophical development, avoiding such terms as 'mystical', 'theosophical', and 'Oriental'. He writes, 'From the sixteenth century to the present, Islamic philosophy has been dominated by a scholastic tradition that continues in its interpretation of the ideals of classical Arabic philosophy,a nd leads to the final acceptance of philosophy by religion.' Ziai writes that far from being an exclusively mystical or theologically oriented task, there is much 'genuine philosophy' being done in the tradition today.

As broad a text as this is, it is in fact just a taste of the larger body of work in Arabic philosophy. Generous bibliographic and end-notation information is provided for further research, both generally and topic-specific. There is a useful index, although one might be a bit confused at time until getting accustomed to the transliteration (theirs is a fairly comprehensible style, but still takes some adjustment to those used to other forms - they do make the concession to Western readers and leave the names of Avicenna and Averroes in their more familiar forms).

This is a fascinating text, good for the student or scholar of philosophy and the history of ideas.

This book is comprised of 12 brief, well-written essays by distinguished researchers, put together by the SUNY Stony Brook professor Nicolas Rzhevsky. The volume is divided into two parts: Cultural Identity and Literature and the Arts. If the first part of the book deals with Russian roots, the second is devoted to the flowers of this civilization.

On the crossroads of these narratives we see a vast land, stretching from East to West emerging from the union of Slavs and Vikings somewhere around the middle of the eighth century as a number of relatively small cities and tribes. Locked in the never-ending war with nomads prince Vladimir tries to unite them around Kiev. In his first attempt he tried to use paganism. He builds up a gallery of local pagan gods, trying to achieve some kind of union and establish certain hierarchy on the symbolic level. Seeing the futility of these attempts, however, he drops pagan faith altogether and adopts Byzantine (`Orthodox') Christianity, which is not dependent on local gods.

As we learn from the essay on Religion by the leading Russian Academician Dmitry Lihachev, having a choice among Islam and other versions of Christianity Vladimir chooses Christianity for the beauty of Byzantine rites and rituals. It is by the beauty of religious acts that God was introduced to the Russian land and the remaining ancient churches testify that because of the beauty God stayed. Church became the place where artists could realize themselves as architects and painters. Christianity also brings a new alphabet. It to this epoch that the first known texts date back.

The ensuing unity enables Kiev to achieve a number of important victories in the wars with nomads. However, Kievan Russia was not strong enough to withstand the Mongol invasion from 1237 to 1240, when Kiev was burned. It became a part of the Golden Horde on a par with Greeks, Poles, Georgians, Armenians, Mordvinians and other peoples. In fact, churches were among the few institutions that withstood the invasion and secured the identity of the Russian land, because pagan Mongols respected all kinds of gods `just in case'.

It is by the boundaries with the West and the East (which included all the Southern people, pagans and Christians alike). While West equated civilization, East was considered a territory for conquest and expansion. It is tempting to see eastward Russian expansion as a mirror of the westward colonization of the North American continent. Indeed in California and Alaska American and Russian settlers meet. It is also important to note that some of the colonizers were fuelled by religious passions over the conflict of starovery (old-believers) with the official reform of the Church by Peter the Emperor. Starovery did not accept the reform of religious rites and were prosecuted heavily by the state and church alike. They found their freedom on the frontier of Russian colonization. By the conquest of `East' Russia eventually established itself as a Western power, and in the East it was the cultural baggage of the West. The unavoidable mix of East and West inside Russia explains well enough the repercussions of identity crisis that Russia slips into from time to time. These boundaries thus limit both the territories of the Russian state and, to a large extent mark the field of intellectual debate.

It is not these grand narratives, however, that make this book so exciting, but the amount of details and `small stories' packed into the 372 pages of this volume. It is impossible to do them justice in the newspaper article. We still need books for that.

There is a wonderful essay on Russian popular culture by Catriona Kelly of Oxford University. In the Soviet-era textbooks, the lower classes were roughly defined by their dvoeverie ("double-faith"), the prominent retention of pagan beliefs alongside their commitment to Christian faith. Instead of dvoeverie, argues Kelly, we should use the term mnogoverie because pagan beliefs do not form a coherent system and thus, combined with Christianity, they produce plural belief systems. Going to the roots of the local obychai (customs), she uncovers an underworld of traditions, habits and superstitions that somehow influence the attitudes of Russian people up to this day. They may be charming and unique like domovoj (house spirit) or leshij (forest spirit), or frightening and commonplace like the fear of the `Other' and criminal counter-culture. Some of the genres and themes of the oral culture prospered during the Soviet era like chastushka - a four-line ditty of humorous or scabrous nature, but its triumph was short-lived compared to anecdote that conquered the Internet. Actually anecdote is the strongest genre of the Russian oral culture that helped to communicate the most important means of resistance against the enormous power of the Soviet state: laugh. The anecdotes are not limited to political topics, though - they actually deal with every field of human existence.

The part of the book devoted to art is as thorough, interesting and profound as the part dealing with the roots of Russian cultural identity. For example, in Russian society the written word was carefully scrutinized by the church and state, Bethea asserts that the writer in general and the poet in particular became secular saints and, very often, a martyr or suffering "holy fool". Other essays of the second part of "Modern Russian Culture" deal with Russian art, music, theater, and film.

If culture and arts provide the antidote to the shallow political language, then "Modern Russian Culture" is certainly one of the best means to overcome stereotypes and misconceptions constructed by the modern political spectacle.

This book and its companion volume (#8) provides the best history of China under the Ming in the English language. Period. It goes into details on all the Ming Emperors, their political problems, and their solutions (or lack of solutions). Given the level of detail and the length of the book (1000 pages) it is very readable and it offers a fascinating look at a culture and government which is, I would argue, poorly understood today.

This book offers a consensus view on the Ming, and includes the work of many highly respected historians who contributed to the book including C. Hucker (the expert in Ming government), Ray Huang (the expert on Ming finances), and F. Mote (who taught Chinese history at Princeton for more than 40 years).

Historical attitudes towards the Ming have changed from the 1960s and this book reflects our new understanding of how the state actually functioned. To pick one obvious detail: the Ming government was less autocratic and more under the control of the Mandarins than was previously thought.

The fall of the Ming is told both here and in Volume 9 (also highly recommended).

The aim of the Cambridge University Press to provide a coherent scholarly work on the early modern English period from manuscript to Milton that is both accessible to the interested public and appropriate for the research student and academic is a lofty one, and fortunately it is a goal they generally succeed in achieving. The scope of the work is vast, from the expected examination of the literary impact of such giants as Milton, Pepys, Shakespeare, Sidney and Donne, to the more specific and thematic discussion on literature and the church, the court, the household, the sense of national identity, and London's influence on authors and the book selling business. The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature is readable to a layman without having sacrificed any of the scruples a rigorous scholarly approach might command.

The Introduction to the book is well worth the read, with the editors stating their goals and intentions for the work; among these is a refusal to 'treat writers simply in terms of political or religious thought.' Instead, the editors have chosen a more inclusive approach, whereby the milieu of a writer is examined with as much - more, in a lot of cases - intensity as the writer themselves. A great deal of effort is spent in providing an adequate historical, religious, political, sexual, private and public history of the times in which writers large and small found themselves. One of the great bulwarks of any literary history, the chapter devoted to a single author, is not present within this volume. The editors state that this was a conscious choice as it expands upon and helps to develop their theme of literature as an outgrowth of the times, yes, but also a product, an examination, a complimentary action, a protest, a celebration. They write, 'Our aim here is to achieve freshness by allowing individual authors to be evaluated from multiple perspectives and located in relation to a range of institutional sites.' For the most part the history succeeds in these endeavours, though too little time is given to developing an overall historic sense of time and place, at the expense of devoting a great deal of time to what may seem too esoteric for anyone not a specialist in the field. It is very much the case that the work relies on the reader having a solid grounding in English history from 1528 - 1674, including but certainly not limited to a detailed understanding of the political situation during the one hundred and forty-six years covered, an appreciation of the stance of government, monarch, church and the nobility, and an awareness of the general political situation of Europe during this time. This level of knowledge is perhaps to be expected from an academic, but a casual reader may find themselves somewhat swamped with names, dates, places and battles that are not give an explicit significance or description.

The first part of the history, titled 'Modes and Means of Literary Production, Circulation and Reception' is not specifically tied to a certain decade or monarch's rule like the rest of the parts, rather it serves as an overview and introduction to the major themes present throughout the remainder of the book. The work opens by examining the vast legal and creative upheavals that came about as manuscripts and monastic copying were replaced by the Gutenberg printing press and the astonishing realisation that anyone, anywhere could print anything they liked and distribute it throughout the nation. In a situation that will seem familiar to anyone who is knowledgeable in the current copyright woes of the RIAA and MPAA, authors who wished to publish their writing in the late 16th century were dismayed to learn that the Crown had acted to stamp down on 'unauthorised printing', going so far as to require that every single piece of printed material be approved by the Stationer's Guild, with the penalty of imprisonment and hefty fines being doled out to those who had the audacity to print their own poems, essays and other works on a printing press. The 'author' as we know them today did not exist, with the vast majority of literary aspirants signing away any right to money or recognition to the printing company who agreed - and was usually paid by the author to do so - to print their work. Popular works of literature were known by the company who printed them rather than the author themselves, a situation which inevitably caused a massive rebellion by the creators of the works. These printing companies - from the Stationer's Guild who oversaw the entirety of printing in England, to the large and small companies who printed the works - often owned ridiculously large and expansive swaths of the literary landscape. As an example, a single company in the early 17th century owned the right to solely publish legal texts throughout England for seven years, and was able to punish anyone who attempted to provide their own legal texts.

Following this first overview part are four further parts which break into broad monarchic time lines. These parts are further broken into such chapters as 'Literature and London', 'Literature and the Household', 'Literature and the Church', etc. These chapter headings are used in each of the four parts, which helps to provide an ongoing sense of literary growth throughout England. In 1528 it was unlikely that there was more than a handful of people in a single town who could read and write, by 1674, the vast majority of people, from the rudest peasant to the King or Queen, could read and write with ease, and all had reasonable access to printed works.

The Chapters concerning Literature and the Church were, to my reading, the most impenetrable. Whereas I am familiar with English history and English literature in a general sense, the 'Church' chapters are very focused indeed, examining specific treatises and pamphlets written by (to me) obscure clergymen. A lot of the names and events were completely unfamiliar and little attempt was made by the authors to provide an adequate background. These chapters often left me with an overwhelming sense of words having rushed me by.

The other chapters, however, were certainly easier to digest. Perhaps because most everyone is familiar with Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I and Milton, these chapters were able to ground themselves in the familiar while exploring in great detail the smaller names and events of the time. Because the editors chose to eschew a history that focusses primarily on the 'great names' of literature, authors such as Shakespeare and Milton are seen not as blinding flashes of genius in an otherwise dark void but men writing within a teeming chaos of authors no less active, popular or touched by genius. While the supremacy of these authors are duly noted, the decision on the part of the editors to provide a panoramic view of the literary environment proved immensely helpful to a proper understanding of early modern English literature.

The last eighty pages or so of the work are devoted to a series of chronologies outlining the major political and literary events of the one hundred and forty-six years covered. These chronologies were very helpful in further placing an author within their milieu, and helped to reinforce the concept of an inclusive history rather than a 'great names' history.

The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature is dense, and can be difficult at times. A recommended way of reading the text would be to focus on areas that seem interesting, rather than to slog it out through a mass of words on a topic uncared for. The history is a great treasure of information, and has an excellent bibliography at the end for further reading. While it is difficult, and relates to a quite specific time and place in world history, the work is highly rewarding and always, surprisingly, entertaining to read. Recommended for literary explorers.

The Cambridge History of Islam, editors: P.M. Holt, Anne Lambton, and Bernard Lewis. 1970 hardback, 2 vols.(reprinted 1992, 1994, 1995?): Vol.1: "The Central Islamic Lands"; Vol.2: "The Further Islamic Lands--Islamic Society & Organization"; (1,781 pgs). This two-volume set begins with Arabia before the Prophet Muhammad. The books provide "a comprehensive history of the Muslim lands over more than 13 centuries, to the years following the Second World War. They attempt to view Islam as a cultural whole and to enable the reader to follow all the threads -- historical, theological, philosophical, political, economic, scientific, military, artistic -- related to the rise, spread, and development of Islamic civilization." There are numerous maps and photographs. 1977: issued in paperback in 4 volumes. Vol. 1A: "The Rise and Domination of the Arabs" (Pre-Muslim Arabia.-1918) [Parts I-III] {ISBN:0-521-291-356}; Vol. 1B: "The Central Islamic Lands since 1918" [Part IV] {ISBN:0-521-291-364}; Vol. 2A "The Indian Sub-continent, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Muslim West" [Parts V-VIII] {ISBN:0-521-291-372}; Vol. 2B "Islamic Society and Civilization" [Part VIII] {ISBN:0-521-291-380}. The four paperback volumes comprise the eight parts of the original two volume hardcover edition. 1978: 4 vols. in hardback. Other reprints since the 1980s. Be aware of which volume you are buying.