As its subtitle indicates, this book dispels a number of imprecisions, equivocations, and outright lies regarding the Islamic conquest of Spain in late antiquity or the early medieval period. (The Romans called it Hispania, a word that evolved into the medieval Latin Spannia and eventually the modern España.) Its author, for many years professor of...
Raphael Israeli examines one of the most difficult political problems of our time: The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. He approaches the subject by presenting and analyzing research on the conflict by earlier Israeli historians (the so-called Old Historians), by more recent Israeli historians (the so-called New Historians who coined the label Old...
There has been for years a growing clamor in the United States demanding a “normalization” of economic and diplomatic relations with Cuba. But the sources of the clamor have become more varied, as have their motivations. At first there were only the lefties, fans of the “real socialism” supposedly found in the Marxist-Leninist paradise of...
This book’s lugubrious title, Franco’s Crypt, indicates its partiality. Written in a fluid style befitting its author, who has published in the New York Times Book Review and served as editor for The Times Literary Supplement, the book draws on multiple sources, including necrology, photography, monuments, museums, art, literature, memoirs, histories, and school curricula. The...
God’s Crucible is a fluid 473-page panegyric of Islam and a visceral diatribe against the Christian West. Significantly, in the Index, one finds under al-Andalus the inevitable entry on “Christian fanaticism” but searches in vain for a reference to “Islamic fanaticism” or anything remotely analogous to it. Levering Lewis’s thesis is not new, having often...
On March 10, 2010, a group of tourists, reputedly “students from Austria,” entered the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption in Córdoba and started a Muslim prayer. Private guards and, later, police arrested them. One of the students apologized, saying they had “no intention to offend.” The students’ organization in Austria apologized as well,...
Transaction Publishers has a long history of producing first-rate scholarly works, among them a series of books under the title Cuban Communism, indispensable for the study of post-1959 Cuba. The present one, by the editor of the series, covers a half-century of Cuban Marxism and introduces us to many of the major issues related to...
In good journalistic fashion, a Chicago Tribune article on Haitian adoptions (“Haitian adoptions left in limbo by earthquake,” January 17) consists of heart-rending descriptions of the plight of an American woman facing the sudden problems created by the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti on January 12. The woman is worried about “her 4-year-old adoptive daughter,...
The Muslim rage at Benedict XVI’s citation of a late 14th-century Byzantine emperor who condemned Muhammad’s call to spread Islam through war has obscured the numerous cultural implications of the Pope’s learned speech. One of them is the unique importance for Western civilization of classical thought, in general, and Greek thought, in particular—as preserved and...
Octavio Paz, who died m April, was one of the greatest poets of the second half of the 20th century. On the left for most of his life, Paz held convictions that were often more compatible with conservative thought. Paz was not a “progressive.” In fact, he complained that the ethos of progress had no...