That Day I Read No More

[jsburbidge]

 I usually review books because I find something positive in them worth pointing out. Most books which fall to the bottom of my personal rankings are merely boring, or badly written. Rarely does one occasion enough of a negative reaction to energise me enough to write and then post a negative review.

 

Well, one has now crossed my path, bought because of good reviews combined with a (temporary) bargain from the publisher: The Invention of Yesterday, by Tamim Ansary.

 

There used to be a meme about Jared Diamond: that he sounded convincing until he started to deal with one's own discipline, at which point one wanted suddenly to qualify everything he said heavily. Ansary's book is like that, except that it doesn't have to wait for one's own discipline. A decent familiarity with the subject is all it takes.

 

Ansary's handling of the origin of language, at best, reflects one of a competing set of arguments, none of which can currently be said to be conclusive; he does not even hint at this.

 

His treatment of Indo-European origins is not very good. His treatment of Israelite origins is utterly uninformed and uncritical. I can't say much for his treatment of the Republican Romans.

But what finally led me to the classic "This is not a book to be put down lightly. It should be thrown with great force" was the following excerpt: "Hercules and Achilles, for example, had supernatural gifts because they were born of human mothers impregnated by gods".

 

Why should I accept anything he says about the ancient Greeks when he gets something like the above - which is fundamental to the plot of the Iliad - wrong? No Thetis, no Shield of Achilles.

Can one possibly even have skimmed the Iliad without knowing who Thetis is, or be accepted as speaking with any authority about Archaic Greece who has not read it, and discussions if it, with some attention? (And his historical treatment of Archaic Greece is grossly oversimplified and inaccurate.)

 

His theses about interconnection between cultures are at least in their face interesting. But to be at all convincing he has to get a lot more right about specifics and be a lot less lazy about how he processes his sources, or, better, change his sources.

 

Comments

[ndrosen]

Well then there’s a book which I will probably not bother reading; your post may be a bit of a public service.