By Laila Lalami. A conquistador leads a party of 600 into present-day Florida. A decade later, four men from the expedition emerge in Mexico: three Spainards and a black Muslim. This is The Moor’s Account. If it is fiction, it is fiction truer than any American history I got in high school. It’s a story… More Review: The Moor’s Account
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia promises not to waste your time like the pompous gasbags of “foreign” literature such as Salman Rushdie. OK, Hamid doesn’t mention Rushdie by name, but I know that’s who he meant.… More Review: Getting Filthy Rich
Translated by Shaykh Tosun Bayrak Not about martial codes, but more of a guidebook on proper etiquette (adab) in Islam. The biggest focus was on the virtue of generosity. True generosity is giving before your brother is forced to ask, because in asking, the needy one is humiliated by his need. A poem is… More Review: The Way of Sufi Chivalry
by Salman Rushdie Could the Booker Prize have gone to a novel that treats three generations of an extended family but remains emotionally dead-flat aside from twin swellings of self-pity and self-love? Was a career launched by a book that contains 50 years of intricately plotted interconnections, parallels and synchronicities across the breadth of the… More Review: Midnight’s Children
By Giancarlo Casale. The Ottomans were very active throughout the Indian Ocean world during the 1500s despite having no access to or knowledge of the area at the beginning of the century. The author shows their exploration of the Indian Ocean is closely analogous to the activities of the Portuguese in same period. The most… More Review: Ottoman Age of Exploration
By Mark Ames Why do they hate America? Because there is a lot there to hate, says Mark Ames. Going Postal connects a lot of far-flung points to show the creepy similarities that exist between school and workplace rage killings and early American slave rebellions. Among them is that each and every slave rebellion was… More Review: Going Postal
Colin Woodward traces the origins of settlement in the United States to demonstrate that American attitudes, values and politics are highly regional and perpetuate over time. This basis for this is the “Founder’s Effect”, a recognized phenomenon whereby the original settlers of an area have an outsize effect on culture across time. Looking at patterns… More American Nations: Review
Theodore W. Allen (1919-2005) told me where white people come from. We like to think we know who we are, and indeed many things about ourselves we can easily define: male, muslim, American. But I am white and I could not explain to myself what that meant. Any meaning I set was either too narrow,… More Knowledge of Self