<History in a hurry> by Theodore K. Rabb (转) 这评论也太刻薄了。。。
Historians of Enrupe are often on the defensive these days. Not only do we have to confront the largest mountain of sholarship in our discipline, written in over two dozen languages, but we have to endure the assumption that we are a kind of Dead Professors Society. The publication by a distinguished press of a massive survey of the subject, nearly 1,400 pages long, ought therefore to be welcomed as a blod assertion of vitality, especially since its author, especially since its author, a professor at the University of London, is expert in an area rarely given prominence in such surveys, Polish history.
Norman Davie's emphasis on eastern Enrope underlies his long introduction, which dwells on the dificiencies of his predecessors. They are variously "over-serious", "cock-eyed" and "really vicious", especially if they speak of "Western civilization" , a label that, in Mr. Davies's view, encourages neglect or dimissal of his particular terrain. Nevertheless, having denounced the likes of William McNeill, Mortimer Adler and the entire Stanford University history department for their derelictions, Mr. Davies offers his own invidious cultural comparison:" There is no known Vietnamese Virgil, no African Aquinas." As it happens, he readdresses the East-West imbalance only occasionally: Peter the Great and Catherine the Great still get less than a quarter of the attention given to Louis XIV.
The academic acerbity continues as the story of Europe unfolds. Perhaps because Mr. Davies studied at Oxford and lives nearby, he disparages one Cambridge historian who, "sitting in a backwater", devalued the Magyars; and belittles another who, writing 40 years ago, failed to display the enlightened understanding of alchemy that emerged from subsequent research. He also likes to advancea view by contrasting it with the shortcomings of other accounts. Thus, instead of simply characterizing Gothic architecture or explaning the rise of Prussia, he sets up straw men whom his interpretation will "in fact" contradict. When he resists the term "revolution" to describe the military changes wrought by gunpowder, for example, his justification is that "most things are now classed s a 'revolution' ", and before he can tell us about Roman government, he warns us that it is "the subject of many misconceptions". Yet he is indulgent toward himself, notably in a piece about the Oxford University Press, where he lists, among the highlights of half a millennium of publications, Robert Burton, the Bible, Maimodies, Sir William Blackstone, Lewis Carroll and Norman Davies.
This last is one of 301 "capsules": insertions into the text that range form one paragraph to over two pages. Along with the 12 chapter endings, which devote half a dozen or more pages to a particular envent, like the siege of Syracues in 212 B.C., these capsules offer a closer look at a particular topic that has caught Mr. Davies's fancy. They have self-conscious cute titles (for the Oxford Press see "Rufinus," for commercial agriculture"Cap -Ag", for small modern nations "Eresti", for kilts "Philibeg") and vary widely in content and intesrest, from a brief set of facts about the Danish Sound to a charming explication of inns' names. THe capsules, heavily corss-referenced - three are recommended in one sentence, six in one capsule, and later we are asked to leap from Freud to Schiller's "Freude" - alternative between distracting interruptions and welcome touches of color. Published on their own, rather than adding weight to this daunting tome, they might have formed a nice coffee-table book.
The basic story that Mr. Davies crisply tells is straightforward and conventional - that is , political and military, with regular excursions into social, economic and cultural themes. As withh any such vast enterprise, there are oddities of emphasis and disparities of cogency. Although music does well, the visual arts do not. The 72 illustrations, tiny, indistint and crammed into two 16-page section, with identiciation hundreds of pages away in an appendi, seem irrelevant, even when they are not printed backward or given misleading meaning. Greek architecture gets a paragraph (and no picture), while Greek sexuality (despite a sneer at "fashionable scholarship") gets a page. For a historian who likes to defind maligned or neglected peoples, Mr. Davies is curiously ready to accept the stereotype of the Vikings as "murderous" without mentioning their remarkable esthetic sense. And we are told, without further ado, that the painter Albrecht Altdorfer was a landscapist; that the Pazzi chapel and its style were admired, but not what they looked like; and that the Dutch masters, particularly Rembradt, "surpassed" their Flemish colleagues Rubens and Van Dyck. Given the increasing interaction of historians and art historians, and the growing use of the arts as windows into culture and society, this is a weakness that makes the book less up-to-date as well as less attractive than it could have been.
Omissions and idiosyncrasies also detract from the comprehensiveness and persuasiveness of the account. Anatomy, for instance, gets no mention in the discussion of the scientific revolution. William Harvey does not make it into this book (nor does the shaping of English Law by Henry II), but an 11th-century cardinal, Humbert de Moyenmoutier, and a Reformation Spiritualist reformer, Hans Denck, do. A quirky series of appendixes (including a "selection" of wars, 1648-1789) offers entertaining material about some of Mr. Daves's favourate sidelights, though one wonders how " the standard repertoire of Grand Opera" can include Verdi's "I Lombardi" but not his "Don Carlo" Nor is it clear why a denunciation of the bombing of Dresden (which is contextualized with only a passing mention of Luftwaffe's earlier assults on civilians, a disparity that is heightened, over 500 pages later, by the fleeting and dispassionate reference to Guernia) is placed in , and unconvincingly linked to, the 14th century; why many maps are printed, confusingly, with the west at the top (though not a map of the Netherlands, despite the Dutch habit of representing their country that way); or why Mr. Davies singularly and irrelevantly points out that one historian of the Netherlands, Simon Schama, is Jewish. The latter is part of a chain of such curiosities: the (false) description of Max Bruch as Jewish; the equating of the atrocities of the now notorious German police battalion in the Otwock ghetto in 1942 with the role of Jews in the postwar Communist security forces in Poland; a skewed discussion of usury; the repeated identification of Jews in modern times; and errors about the origins of ghettos and the reading of the Torah in services. Moreover, the relentless cascade of dates, place names (most without maps to locate them) and listings (e.g., the seven sees of the Bulgarian Church) raises questions about audience. Students will find the book too personal and allusive, and the index totally inadequate, while the genearal reader will have to plow through two many longueurs, such as the names and dates of six almost forgottern contemporaries of Weber and Schuber, or (on the same page) the names and dates of Louis XVI's five ministries.
And yet one could recommend this as an eccentric but often vigorously written introduction to the European past, enlivened with telling insights, apt quatations and excellent quick overviews of such sopics as the Crusades and the Hanseatic League, were it not for a fundamental failing that undermines it as a serious work of history. An early hint of trouble is the appearance of the historian Bronowski, on page 2, as Joseph, not Jacob. A little later we learn that, General Sherman and others notwithstanding, the United States "has never known the lash of war on its own face". And then the mistakes multiply: Hannibal and the Renaissance scholar Lozenzo Valla's exposure of the forgery of the Donation of Constantine are put in the wrong centuries; the Dalmatian St. Jerpme becomes a native of the Rhineland; the first mention of Mosow in the historical record is given two different dates, the beginings of the Dutch Revolt is given three.; Copernicus' work is misunderstood; Cathrine de' Medici appears as Marie (an entirely different queen); Lutheran Saxony terns Calvinist; ther are three errors in two lines about Queen Christina; the Trevi Fountain moves to the Piazza Navona and becomes a work of Bernini; Cromwell is said incorrectively to have decided on Charlie I's execution; and in one sentence the political theorist Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes both get the wrong publication date for their most famous works. Without looking anything up, this reviewer spotted inaccuracies, on average, every other page. Things got so bad that eventually I counted seven wrong dates in 11 lines, and soon thereafter (nearly two-thirds of the way through the text) I realized that there was little point either in continuing a close reading or in recommending the book to anyone who might regard it as a source of information.
Vigor of style and an eye for vivid detail are fine qualities in a novelist, but in a historian they must be preceded by care with facts and respect for hard-won knowledge. How a senior scholar and a major press could ignore that truism is hard to understand. It is not heartwarming to have to describe a book as mean-spirited, self-indulgent, cute, unbalanced or confusing. Yet those traits might combine to form a distinctive and stimulating whole. Reliability, on the other hand, cannot be compromised. Although a few errors would be understandable, an accumulation on this scale defies comprehension. A huge effort of research and synthesis has gone to waste.
Norman Davie's emphasis on eastern Enrope underlies his long introduction, which dwells on the dificiencies of his predecessors. They are variously "over-serious", "cock-eyed" and "really vicious", especially if they speak of "Western civilization" , a label that, in Mr. Davies's view, encourages neglect or dimissal of his particular terrain. Nevertheless, having denounced the likes of William McNeill, Mortimer Adler and the entire Stanford University history department for their derelictions, Mr. Davies offers his own invidious cultural comparison:" There is no known Vietnamese Virgil, no African Aquinas." As it happens, he readdresses the East-West imbalance only occasionally: Peter the Great and Catherine the Great still get less than a quarter of the attention given to Louis XIV.
The academic acerbity continues as the story of Europe unfolds. Perhaps because Mr. Davies studied at Oxford and lives nearby, he disparages one Cambridge historian who, "sitting in a backwater", devalued the Magyars; and belittles another who, writing 40 years ago, failed to display the enlightened understanding of alchemy that emerged from subsequent research. He also likes to advancea view by contrasting it with the shortcomings of other accounts. Thus, instead of simply characterizing Gothic architecture or explaning the rise of Prussia, he sets up straw men whom his interpretation will "in fact" contradict. When he resists the term "revolution" to describe the military changes wrought by gunpowder, for example, his justification is that "most things are now classed s a 'revolution' ", and before he can tell us about Roman government, he warns us that it is "the subject of many misconceptions". Yet he is indulgent toward himself, notably in a piece about the Oxford University Press, where he lists, among the highlights of half a millennium of publications, Robert Burton, the Bible, Maimodies, Sir William Blackstone, Lewis Carroll and Norman Davies.
This last is one of 301 "capsules": insertions into the text that range form one paragraph to over two pages. Along with the 12 chapter endings, which devote half a dozen or more pages to a particular envent, like the siege of Syracues in 212 B.C., these capsules offer a closer look at a particular topic that has caught Mr. Davies's fancy. They have self-conscious cute titles (for the Oxford Press see "Rufinus," for commercial agriculture"Cap -Ag", for small modern nations "Eresti", for kilts "Philibeg") and vary widely in content and intesrest, from a brief set of facts about the Danish Sound to a charming explication of inns' names. THe capsules, heavily corss-referenced - three are recommended in one sentence, six in one capsule, and later we are asked to leap from Freud to Schiller's "Freude" - alternative between distracting interruptions and welcome touches of color. Published on their own, rather than adding weight to this daunting tome, they might have formed a nice coffee-table book.
The basic story that Mr. Davies crisply tells is straightforward and conventional - that is , political and military, with regular excursions into social, economic and cultural themes. As withh any such vast enterprise, there are oddities of emphasis and disparities of cogency. Although music does well, the visual arts do not. The 72 illustrations, tiny, indistint and crammed into two 16-page section, with identiciation hundreds of pages away in an appendi, seem irrelevant, even when they are not printed backward or given misleading meaning. Greek architecture gets a paragraph (and no picture), while Greek sexuality (despite a sneer at "fashionable scholarship") gets a page. For a historian who likes to defind maligned or neglected peoples, Mr. Davies is curiously ready to accept the stereotype of the Vikings as "murderous" without mentioning their remarkable esthetic sense. And we are told, without further ado, that the painter Albrecht Altdorfer was a landscapist; that the Pazzi chapel and its style were admired, but not what they looked like; and that the Dutch masters, particularly Rembradt, "surpassed" their Flemish colleagues Rubens and Van Dyck. Given the increasing interaction of historians and art historians, and the growing use of the arts as windows into culture and society, this is a weakness that makes the book less up-to-date as well as less attractive than it could have been.
Omissions and idiosyncrasies also detract from the comprehensiveness and persuasiveness of the account. Anatomy, for instance, gets no mention in the discussion of the scientific revolution. William Harvey does not make it into this book (nor does the shaping of English Law by Henry II), but an 11th-century cardinal, Humbert de Moyenmoutier, and a Reformation Spiritualist reformer, Hans Denck, do. A quirky series of appendixes (including a "selection" of wars, 1648-1789) offers entertaining material about some of Mr. Daves's favourate sidelights, though one wonders how " the standard repertoire of Grand Opera" can include Verdi's "I Lombardi" but not his "Don Carlo" Nor is it clear why a denunciation of the bombing of Dresden (which is contextualized with only a passing mention of Luftwaffe's earlier assults on civilians, a disparity that is heightened, over 500 pages later, by the fleeting and dispassionate reference to Guernia) is placed in , and unconvincingly linked to, the 14th century; why many maps are printed, confusingly, with the west at the top (though not a map of the Netherlands, despite the Dutch habit of representing their country that way); or why Mr. Davies singularly and irrelevantly points out that one historian of the Netherlands, Simon Schama, is Jewish. The latter is part of a chain of such curiosities: the (false) description of Max Bruch as Jewish; the equating of the atrocities of the now notorious German police battalion in the Otwock ghetto in 1942 with the role of Jews in the postwar Communist security forces in Poland; a skewed discussion of usury; the repeated identification of Jews in modern times; and errors about the origins of ghettos and the reading of the Torah in services. Moreover, the relentless cascade of dates, place names (most without maps to locate them) and listings (e.g., the seven sees of the Bulgarian Church) raises questions about audience. Students will find the book too personal and allusive, and the index totally inadequate, while the genearal reader will have to plow through two many longueurs, such as the names and dates of six almost forgottern contemporaries of Weber and Schuber, or (on the same page) the names and dates of Louis XVI's five ministries.
And yet one could recommend this as an eccentric but often vigorously written introduction to the European past, enlivened with telling insights, apt quatations and excellent quick overviews of such sopics as the Crusades and the Hanseatic League, were it not for a fundamental failing that undermines it as a serious work of history. An early hint of trouble is the appearance of the historian Bronowski, on page 2, as Joseph, not Jacob. A little later we learn that, General Sherman and others notwithstanding, the United States "has never known the lash of war on its own face". And then the mistakes multiply: Hannibal and the Renaissance scholar Lozenzo Valla's exposure of the forgery of the Donation of Constantine are put in the wrong centuries; the Dalmatian St. Jerpme becomes a native of the Rhineland; the first mention of Mosow in the historical record is given two different dates, the beginings of the Dutch Revolt is given three.; Copernicus' work is misunderstood; Cathrine de' Medici appears as Marie (an entirely different queen); Lutheran Saxony terns Calvinist; ther are three errors in two lines about Queen Christina; the Trevi Fountain moves to the Piazza Navona and becomes a work of Bernini; Cromwell is said incorrectively to have decided on Charlie I's execution; and in one sentence the political theorist Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes both get the wrong publication date for their most famous works. Without looking anything up, this reviewer spotted inaccuracies, on average, every other page. Things got so bad that eventually I counted seven wrong dates in 11 lines, and soon thereafter (nearly two-thirds of the way through the text) I realized that there was little point either in continuing a close reading or in recommending the book to anyone who might regard it as a source of information.
Vigor of style and an eye for vivid detail are fine qualities in a novelist, but in a historian they must be preceded by care with facts and respect for hard-won knowledge. How a senior scholar and a major press could ignore that truism is hard to understand. It is not heartwarming to have to describe a book as mean-spirited, self-indulgent, cute, unbalanced or confusing. Yet those traits might combine to form a distinctive and stimulating whole. Reliability, on the other hand, cannot be compromised. Although a few errors would be understandable, an accumulation on this scale defies comprehension. A huge effort of research and synthesis has gone to waste.
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