Category Archives: History

Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary

by Rebecca

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes
written by Tamim Ansary
read by Tamim Ansary
2009

This is an amazing book and I highly recommend it. I listened to the audiobook version which was read by the author, which I always appreciate. It is also unfortunately timely, what with the current war with Iran. I’ve been sitting on this review for a couple of weeks now because I’ve had trouble figuring out how to describe this book, beyond just saying that everyone should read it.

On the one hand, I want to talk about the things I learned — about the history of the Khalifate, the schism between Shia and Sunni, the Mongol holocaust, the various reform movements, and all of the fascinating stories that kept me variously enthralled and horrified, and surprised in how it all fit together. But if I start, I’ll just want to quote the entire book. Ansary has a conversational way of writing about history, both discussing broad themes and recounting specific events, peppered through with humor. With that in mind, this book is a delightful read.

On the other hand, I want to point out how these stories are the background by which whole populations see the world and make decisions based on the patterns in history that they know. Being in the US, protestant Christianity is pervasive and history is told with the US as the focal point, to the extent that it can be a struggle to image an alternative. This book provides an alternative, showing what history looks like when Islam is the pervasive religion and the geography Ansary defines as “the middle world” is the focal point. With that in mind, this is an important read.

This book is very much what it claims to be: it’s a world history book written for a western layperson, and also a demonstration of how subjective even factual history can be, based on which events are considered important or not. In the introduction, Ansary talks about how he was inspired to write this book as a result of having previously written a history textbook, specifically for a Texas school system in 2000, that had a set outline of what was important to discuss, with most of Arab history missing entirely. He was inspired to write a pointed response, since in this book, much of European history is insignificant and the US is barely considered a nation before the late 1800s.

Ansary makes a point that there are many world histories that can be truly told very differently depending on which culture is providing the perspective. World histories told through the East Asian, African, or Native American eyes would have just as little or even less overlap than world histories through Islamic and European eyes have. I kind of want to read those histories now too. But in the meantime, I’ll just have to read Ansary’s other books, because he really is an excellent writer.

While writing up this review, I also discovered that the book is available, in its entirety, on the Internet Archive! Go read it!

The Gods of Gotham

by Anna

By Lindsay Faye

Whew, this book… I picked it up because it is the same author as the excellent Jane Steele, but whoo boy, are there some timely commentaries here. Set in 1845, New York City is recovering from yet another major fire, facing a huge influx of Irish immigrants due to the potato famine, and establishing the first politically organized police force, all to much turmoil. It’s a little disconcerting to have the ‘Nationalists’ of the time ranting against “a standing army” of the new police. The parallels of the past and present create a somewhat dizzying double vision (one character explaining the uphill battle for acceptance that the new police are facing: “New Yorkers eat incompetent for breakfast… and our criminal population couches their arguments in the language of patriotism”).

Our protagonist, reluctantly shoehorned into the police by his politically ambitious brother, quickly discovers a pedophile ring run by a large political donor, at one point described as “a benefactor, one might even say a very personal friend.” (book copyright in 2012, by the way). It is a gripping mystery, dramatic character study, and stringent love letter to New York City, all very well written, and I honestly struggled to get through it.

All struggles were on me as a reader, though, and this novel helped clarify my personal reading tastes. Having recently read and loved Women’s Hotel, also a historical love letter to NYC of sorts, in which little actually happens, I realized that I very much prefer stories that are smaller in scope, focusing more on daily life than sweeping cultural changes. While ratcheting up action and suspense of course keep me riveted, I also start to feel a little overwhelmed by it all and unable to really sink into the writing itself.

At the same time, the news has been an absolute maelstrom, and I’m struggling to focus on anything at all at this time. I’ve started and stopped any number of books over the last few weeks, so the fact that I read all 400+ pages of this one is a real testament to the writing, regardless of how I feel about the narrative after the fact.

Wicked River by Lee Sandlin

by Rebecca

Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild
written by Lee Sandlin
read by Jeff McCarthy
2010

This is a wild ride. It’s a non-fiction black-comedy history book. It’s a collection of crazy stories about unpleasant people living awful lives and they are hilarious. Except that sometimes it gets grim enough that it overloads my sense of humor and just gets super depressing even in its ridiculousness. But it really is fascinating and an excellent look at American history and social movements. It’s kind of amazing how many patterns of events and types of people I recognize as being present in today’s world.

This is by the same author who wrote Storm Kings , which I enjoyed so much that I immediately checked out their other audiobook. Storm Kings is the better book, with a more cohesive storyline, while Wicked River is more a scattershot of stories and events, but it’s still very good and very impactful. Each chapter looks at a different aspect of life along the Mississippi, mostly pre-Civil War, skipping around in time and location, with a lot of stories about the lives of specific individuals and events. It gets into the nitty gritty of life and death and trade, the horrors of recurring epidemics, the cognitive dissonance of slave-holding societies, the lawlessness of the various settler justice systems, intermittent excesses of debauchery, celebrations of casual violence, ubiquitous drunkenness, and a vast cast of characters from all walks of life.

The book concludes with the Mississippi River Commission being established immediately post-Civil War and essentially taming the river, at the same time that railroads were replacing boats for transport. In the end, there’s a sense of nostalgia for the wildness that has been lost, because the river cultures were amazing and easily romanticized, even though, or perhaps especially because, they sound truly awful to have lived through.

Nicked

by Anna

By M. T. Anderson

Described as a “wildly imaginative, genre-defying, and delightfully queer adventure,” I knew Nicked was going to be weird, but I hadn’t expected it to be quite so laugh-out-loud funny. In many ways, the humor had both a dryness and absurdity that reminded me of Catch-22, without being nearly so bleak, which is saying a lot for a 11th century setting.

A lowly monk is voluntold by his local bishop to accompany a ‘saint hunter’ in ‘liberating’ the reliquary bones of St. Nicholas from its celebrated gravesite and temple to the monk and bishop’s own town. In the middle of a plague, they hope the reportedly healing bones will be able to save the populace, so there is some redeeming motivation. The author claims that this based on a true story, and has the references to back it up, though he also explains that any deviation from strict accuracy is also highly representative of medieval nonfiction, which took plenty of licenses of its own (his afterward is well worth a read).

The humor comes from both the strangeness of the period in general and the quest in particular, and the familiarity of political and religious bickering across all times and geographies. The common people everywhere make due during times of great upheaval, and every interaction is a delight. The heist is also so well written, with setbacks and twists and turns that kept me agog. My one caveat is that there is a framing narrative that sometimes gets very philosophical and that I couldn’t always follow, but it is also used sparingly, so I didn’t find it a detraction.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

by Rebecca

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
2013
read by Robin Wall Kimmerer
2016

This is a gorgeous and fascinating book, and I’m glad that I was able to listen to a version read by the author. The book is a wide ranging series of stories and musings about her life, family history, biology, ecology, and reclaiming that which is too nearly lost. It starts with a very personal focus, about her life and self-reflection and moves onto some really fascinating discussions of plants and of Native American culture and history, and then continues onto a discussion of both the dangers of ecological destruction and the importance of not giving up on repairing such casualties.

Kimmerer was raised with a Native American’s perspective on nature which gave her a love of plants and a desire to study them, and then went on to get a PhD and then a professorship in biology with a very scientific perspective on nature. It was later that she realized how important it was to combine the two approaches to nature rather than to give up one for the other. The scientific perspective is one of studying plants as objects, with scientists as unbiased outsiders, while the Native American perspective is one of being part of the nature with humanity as the younger sibling needing to learn from the plants and animals who came before them.

One of the themes that really got to me was her description of how nature is a gift economy: plants give fruits and berries to the birds, and birds give transportation of seeds to the plants. And also how humans are part of this gift economy, not separate from it. Our role in nature is supposed to be taking what is given with gratitude and giving back with reciprocity. The dangers comes with refusing what is given, taking what is not given, not having gratitude, and not giving back.

Another metaphor that she used to great effect was delving into the story of the windigo — a Native American monster that is constantly hungry and can never be satiated — and how capitalist society is trying to turn everyone into this very monster: hungry for more and never satisfied.

The audiobook is approximately 17 hours long, so I’ve been listening to this on my work commute for more than a month, and Anna has been inundated with “In Braiding Sweetgrass…” statements, because every day there is some new and fascinating story or perspective. I’ve also had to deal with becoming a bit teary-eyed while driving a few times.

This is truly an amazing book, and I highly recommend it to basically anyone and everyone.

Power Born of Dreams by Mohammad Sabaaneh

by Rebecca

Power Born of Dreams: My story is Palestine
written and illustrated by Mohammad Sabaaneh
2021

This reads more like prose poetry than a standard graphic novel, and it’s gorgeous and also devastating. Sabaaneh is an artist, journalist, and political cartoonist who lives in the West Bank but wrote this book while getting his masters degree in London and reflecting back on his time as a political prisoner in Israel and his life in general as a Palestinian. It’s about his life and the life of his community in tiny snippets and stories about oppression and holding onto hope because there’s no other recourse than to hope and dream for better.

I bought this book from the Street Noise Books publisher stall at the Small Press Expo before the most recent series of attacks from Hamas on Israel and from Israel on all of Palestine, but only read it after that was already in the news. The two sets of stories, from reading this book and hearing the news, gave each other context and break my heart. This book is not fictional, for all that it’s structured around a man hearing news from a bird who’s flying through his prison window, and the headlines in the news are not just statistics but real people living and dying and struggling to be free.

The main book is about Sabaaneh’s experience in prison and the small amount of news he was able to hear about what was happening with everyone else, but the afterwards are six single pages with basic introductions to significant historical events, locations, and laws effecting Palestine from 1967 to 2020.

The illustrations are all linocuts (images carved in linoleum and then printed), which are both beautiful and increasingly rare because they’re so time consuming to make. I’m pretty sure the only other book I have that’s similar are the wood cuts in Gods’ Man which was written in 1929.

This book is beautiful and heart-breaking but important, about a current political topic (which is rare for me) and I highly recommend it. Just be prepared to take the emotional hit.

Nonfiction Graphic Novels

by Anna

For several months this summer, my local library ran a reading rewards program for both children and adults, and I should definitely be too old for this, but I was thrilled to be able to read a book and get a little treat for filling out a quick review. After the first few times, I tried to maximize my treats by checking out a bunch of graphic novels, and then didn’t get to them until after the program ended. Even though I didn’t get a chocolate for either of these, I still recommend them quite a bit (and also strongly recommend public libraries)!

The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam

By Ann Marie Fleming

This book, called an “illustrated memoir” caught my eye because it is a really interesting mix of comics panels, photographs, and printed copy, all from the author’s research into her great grandfather. Long Tack Sam was the most famous Chinese acrobat and magician in the US vaudeville circuit in the early 1900s, but he’s basically unheard of today. Fleming pieces together what she can from archival records around the world, and the story she puts together is fascinating.

What is almost as interesting, though, is what she isn’t able to find: Long Tack Sam had told at least three distinct “origin” stories of his upbringing and introduction to acrobatics, all of them about equally likely or unlikely, and with no evidence anymore to substantiate any of them.

In addition to being the story of her great grandfather, it is also the story of Fleming’s search for her ancestry, and also a look at what is preserved and what is lost in history and documents. I occasionally wished the book had explored that last more deeply, but Fleming is already packing a lot into a relatively short book.

The Great American Dust Bowl

By Don Brown

My brother was telling me about the Saharan dust hitting Texas over the summer, and I asked whether that had contributed to the 1930s Dust Bowl. Upon being assured it wasn’t, I realized that I was woefully ignorant of any real knowledge about it and jumped on this very short graphic novel when I saw it at the library. Only 77 pages, and many of them sprawling full-page illustrations, this book is still chock full of facts that seemed to me to give a concise but comprehensive overview of the causes and effects.

The illustrations really captured the horror and scope of it better than the verbal descriptions or numbers. Whole pages of deep brown watercolor splashes enveloping tiny cars in the bottom corner, tall vertical panels with the dust hovering high above the minuscule Washington monument, and 14 panels of storm after storm really give you a sense of how badly the farmers of the plains were pummeled.

Don Brown stays very factual and almost entirely limited to the historical events of the 30s, but still ends the comic ambivalently, that such crises (or worse) could definitely be on the horizon today.

The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, by Hannah-Jones, Watson, and Smith

by Rebecca

The 1619 Project: Born on the Water
written by Nikole Hannah-Jones and Renée Watson
illustrated by Nikkolas Smith
2021

This is a children’s picture book that was part of The 1619 Project and it is beautifully written, gorgeously illustrated, and addresses a difficult but vitally important topic in an age-appropriate manner.

The framing story starts with a young child being given a class assignment to write out their family tree. However, while their white peers are able to go back many generations and list which countries their families came from, this black student can only list three generations and feels ashamed. The main focus of the book is the history of that student’s family that starts with joy and culture and rich history in Africa, goes through great suffering and hardship with kidnapping and enslavement in America, but still perseveres, fights, and survives to live on in the student today. It gives a message that survival in the face of trauma is to be celebrated. Black Americans have a great deal to be proud of in their African roots and their American survival and their achievements – past, present, and future.

I’m particularly impressed with the way this book shows centuries of American slavery as the middle part of the history of the student’s ancestors. Slavery was long and harsh and transformational, but it was not the start of their history and it was not the end of it.

This is clearly intended for a young audience, but I highly recommend it for adults as well, not just for the pure artistry of the writing and illustrations, but also for the soft discussion of a difficult topic.

Who Is Ana Mendieta? by Redfern & Caron

by Rebecca

Who Is Ana Mendieta?
by Christine Redfern & Caro Caron
introduction by Lucy R. Lippard
2011

This is a relatively short but extremely full and dense graphic novel. It’s a biography of an artist, but also a window into an artistic movement, and also a true crime tragedy, and also a demonstration of how systemic prejudice works to keep a whole demographic down. The particular art styles of both the book and the art movement that it describes are not ones that I particularly enjoy (a lot of shock value and intentionally disturbing imagery), and yet, I still highly recommend the book. It was a reminder to me of what second-wave feminism was trying to accomplish and the context it was working in.

Ana Mendieta was born in 1948 in Havana, Cuba, moved to the US in 1961, and died violently in 1985 (her husband was indicted for murder three times by a jury, and acquitted three times by a judge who then sealed the records.) During her life, Mendieta was a rising star in the art world and making waves. But the book also points out that she, like so many women before her, had to be their own firsts, breaking the glass ceiling, not because there hadn’t been women before her, but because the existence of those women was and is so regularly denied. This book itself is an effort to not have Ana Mendieta suffer the same fate, not just of death but of being quietly brushed aside, leaving art history to continue as a history of male artists.

So all of this to say: this book is educational, distasteful, enraging, and important.

illustrated travelogues

by Rebecca

These books make me yearn for the open road. I don’t really enjoy hiking and I haven’t traveled much in a while even before the whole world went into various levels of quarantine but having read/looked through these two beautiful books about traveling the countryside by bicycle and by foot, I yearn. The complete impossibility of doing this myself makes the yearning all the stronger, since it doesn’t have to confront the fact that I like my creature comforts a bit too much for camping.

You & A Bike & A Road
by Eleanor Davis
2017

I received this book as a Christmas present in 2020 and read it within days. It’s basically a copy of the author’s sketch-pad/diary that she kept while making a cross-country bicycle trip from Tuscan, Arizona where her parents live to her home with her husband in Athens, Georgia. The pages are little illustrations of her experiences with short descriptions to show her thoughts. She’s struggling with depression and this is a way for her to get out of her head and try something new and difficult. While the main plot, such as it is, is her personal journey – both physical and emotional – it’s also dotted with stories of the people she comes across at the various resting points. As much as the journey works for Davis, it works for the reader too, to vicariously experience the weirdness, exhaustion, and exhilaration of making this attempt, and get out of my own head too.

The Fifty-Three Stages of the Tokaido
by Hiroshige
1833-1834
published by Heibonsha Ltd, 1960

I received this book for Christmas in 2019, and worked though it in its and starts over the course of a year. The 55 illustrations in this series, showing images from Edo to Kyoto with the 53 stages of the Tokaido in between, are enchanting and lure me into thinking it’s a journey I would like to take. The Tokaido is a 320-mile-long road in Japan that the governments have maintained for centuries, connecting two of the country’s major cities. This set of woodblock prints by Hiroshige romanticizes each stage of the trip – the gorgeous vistas, the exciting markets, the specialized restaurants, and even the uncertain weather – and establishes his reputation as an artist at the same time. The scenes are both gorgeous and fascinating and the way they show calm water and raging storms and mountains both near and far just makes something in my mind un-tense for a little bit.

This specific publication of the illustrations also comes with short descriptions of each which were both helpfully informative and occasionally unintentionally funny. These captions vary between describing the locations (how the stages worked and which services and resources were there), describing the subject matter (what type of people were being shown and what interactions were taking place), and describing the artwork itself (letting me know which ones I should appreciate more than others, in case I wasn’t appreciating them correctly). What I considered particularly funny was the contrast between the detailed discussion regarding exactly when a particular image was set based on the presence of famous travelers versus how casually the descriptions discuss the artistic license used with both the events being shown and even the physical geography of other images that rearranged, removed, or created whole mountains for the aesthetic. But regardless of how much or little accuracy they may have, they are all lovely and intriguing.

In a time when it’s been nearly a full year of staying in my house with a single exciting trip to a grocery store every other week, these books were a chance to imagine a freedom of movement that comes with its own pros and cons, but feels so refreshing just to think about.