The Madness of Through

The Oxford English Dictionary records all the following as legitimate historical spellings of the word through in the manuscript era, not counting any of the forms it labels “scribal errors”:

dorow, dorth, drogh, thorgh, thorght, thoro, thoro’, thorogh, thorou, thorough, thoroughe, thorow, thorowe, thorowgh, thorowh, thorro, thorrow, thoru, thorugh, thorughe, thoruh, thoru3, thorw, thor3, thour, thourch, thourgh, thourth, threu, threw, thro, thro’, throch, throche, throcht, throgh, throght, throu, throuch, throucht, throughe, throuw, throw, throwch, throwe, throwgh, throwghe, throw3e, thru, thruch, thrucht, thruff, thrugh, thrughe, thruht, thru3, thrw, thrwch, thurf, thurgh, thurghe, thurght, thurow, thurrou, thurrowe, thur3, trogh, troght, þerh, þorch, þorgh, þorghe, þorh, þorogh, þorou, þorou3, þorow, þorowe, þoro3, þoru, þoruh, þoruhe, þoruth, þoru3, þorw, þorwe, þorþ, þor3, þour, þourgh, þourh, þourw, þour3, þour3e, þro, þroughe, þrou3, þruh, þurch, þuregh, þureh, þurf, þurgh, þurght, þurh, þurrh, þurth, þuru, þuruh, þurw, þurþ, þur3, þur3e, þur3th.

Lynch, Jack. The Lexicographer's Dilemma (pp. 169-170). 

Bloomsbury Publishing

Vietnam's Horrible Logic

Mark Bowden writes gripping accounts of war, and Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam does not disappoint.  He does not shy away from showing the grim realities of combat.  He explains horrible wounds, methods of death, the filth, the smell, the terrible fear.  Bowden in no way glorifies battle, in fact, he shows us its awful outcomes.

Hue was one of the most important battles in the Vietnam War.   As the subtitle suggests, it was a turning point in American perceptions about the worth of the effort.  After reading Bowden’s book, one has to only conclude that despite Tet’s strategic and tactical failure, it was a win for the other side.  This is all of the horrible logic of the Vietnam War.

Departing Timelines

The Years of Rice and Salt: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, is a 784 epic covering an alternative historical time line from the Middle Ages to (roughly) the present.  Like all alternate histories, there is a point of departure.  In this novel, the Black Death kills all Europeans with the exception of small pockets in northern Scotland.

The novel is a heady mix of adventure, speculation, religious philosophy and ventures into historiography.  For a popular “genre” novel, or any novel for that matter, Robinson deploys an impressive array of knowledge of the cultures he deploys.  The world is divided between empires of sub-continent Indians, the Chinese, various Muslim emirates, and a New World empire originating with the Iroquois Confederacy, and expanding to most of North and South America.  

Sure, Robinson deploys impressive “historical” knowledge in explaining the big picture of his world (although toward the end, there is a great deal of speech making among the characters, which while important, is probably too long) but ultimately this novel is about characters whose names begin with B and K.  They are constantly reincarnated, assuming new guises and, in a sense, evolving as they are reborn.

This is work quite an accomplishment.  One has to wonder what a stiff, messy disaster Salmon Rushdie would have done with the same type of material.  Robinson avoids this, giving us an entertaining and smart novel; two qualities that are difficult to deliver.

Too Much For Too Little

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? by Graham Allison overstates its case and presents too much infrastructure in proving its point.  You don’t need to read or know about Thucydides to understand that an established great power (in this case, the United States) will feel threatened by an emerging great power (here the PRC).

So, there is too much here for too simple of an idea. This is yet again one of those works that could be explained in a page; there is no need for a full length book on the subject.

Informative... Repetitive, part II

The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey is a revisionist history of the rise of Christianity, and the Christian destruction of the classical world. 

Although her thesis is a bit late (unless you are a Christian of a certain type, the fact that Christians destroyed or transformed much of the ‘pagan’ classical world is no longer a surprise) this is still an interesting book, especially for people with no background in this area of study.

But there are problems.  One flaw is that Nixey repeats herself a great deal, basically telling the same tale over and over.  There is little variation in the work, to the point where one feel the urge to skim.  A shorter book, or even a long paper would have been far more compelling to read.

Another flaw is that while Christianity is given some, but little, credit for saving works from the classical world, it is held completely responsible for the total loss of classical works.  Surely this is not true.  Much was lost from wars, fires, neglect, social and economic breakdowns.  Works from antiquity did always need Christians to hasten their disappearance.

Finally Nixey present Christianity in dark tones, hence the title.  But was it really as dark a force as Nixey account?  I think not entirely.  She takes some threads from Rome's marriage to Christianity, and from that, makes a whole cloth.  

Informative... Repetitive

American JewBu by Emily Sigalow is an academic (sociological) exploration of the influence Buddhism has had on American Jews.  Sigalow makes some keen observations, but the book is marred by a great deal of repetition.  She is constantly reminding us of what she is doing, showing us what she does, and then, recapping.  This gets tedious.

She also turns away from two of her more radical (and interesting) statements.  Toward the end she call the expropriation of elements of Buddhist practices by American Jews as whitening and colonial.  She mentions it, but fails to pursue it further.  This was a possibly interesting avenue of approach, but her study pursued it no further.

Certainly, if you are a Jewish person interested in Buddhism and want to see, in one place, how the intersections between the two religions started and developed, Sigalow’s book will be helpful.  But a tightening up of the book’s many repetitions could have made this a far better read.

Lacks Narrative Flow

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney is certainly adequate to the task of explaining both the pandemic and the events that came before and after. I’d say Spinney’s book lacks the logical and organized flow that can be found in Barry’s work on the same topic, The Great Influenza.  Barry’s work has more push.  This book lags in certain areas, as if the author has lost herself in her own maze.  There is also a great deal of needless repetition, which further retards the book's energy and drive.  It is disheartening to read at times.