God’s War: A New History of the Crusades by christopher tyerman belknap, 1,040 pages, $35 Not too many years ago, single-volume histories of the Crusades were a rarity. Bookstores were crowded with volumes on the Civil War or World War II, but there was little on medieval battles fought in . . . . Continue Reading »
Snow by Orhan Pamuk Knopf. 426 pp. $26. Two months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Turkish author Orhan Pamuk published an essay in the New York Review of Books (titled “The Anger of the Damned”) in which Pamuk, who is often mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize, tried . . . . Continue Reading »
On May 24, 1996, a group of Islamic terrorists announced that they had “slit the throats” of seven French Trappist monks whom they had kidnapped from the monastery of Tibherine in Algeria and held as hostages for two months. Prior to the kidnapping, the superior of the monastery, Father . . . . Continue Reading »
The protagonist of No Longer At Ease by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe is a young man named Obi Okonkwo who has recently returned to Nigeria after taking a degree in English literature at Oxford University. Obi’s interview for a civil service position turns into a discussion about . . . . Continue Reading »
Democracy is still very much a minority phenomenon among the nations of the world, but it is hard to deny that there appears to be something like a democratic revolution afoot. According to Samuel Huntington of Harvard University (writing in The National Interest ), there have been three . . . . Continue Reading »
Books on Islam, we are told, are enjoying brisk sales. For reasons related to the imperialist past of those countries, intellectuals in England and France have generally paid more attention to Islam than have Americans. Apart from academic specialists, American interest in Islam has been limited . . . . Continue Reading »
We made a mistake in a recent public symposium by saying, in response to a question, that we had not listened to enough rock music to have an intelligent opinion about it. A journalist reporting on the meeting cited this as evidence certain that this writer is entirely out of touch with the culture . . . . Continue Reading »
As Communism loses its menacing posture and its threat recedes globally. Western concentration is beginning to focus increasingly on an old and inscrutable foe: Islam. The vast natural resources of the Middle East, the birthplace of Islam, coupled with the inherent political instability of the . . . . Continue Reading »
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