“Blood and Roses: One Family's Struggle and Triumph During the Tumultuous Wars of the Roses”, by Helen Castor

426 pages, Harper Perennial, ISBN-13: 978-0007162222

This book tells the story of the Paston family of England from the aftermath of the arrival of Black Plague in England in 1348 to about 1503. These dark times saw the erosion and eventual complete collapse of royal authority in England and the loss of English power in France in a succession of multiple rebellions, usurpations of the throne, kings and royal heirs murdered and killed in battle, a mad king, many nobles executed for supposed “treason”, considerable social unrest, dislocation and lawless anarchy (most of it due to the Wars of the Roses).

The Paston family was then of no national importance and never achieved lasting national prominence. They first emerged from the peasantry into “gentle” status (i.e. members of the local well-to-do landowners in East Anglia) in the lifetime of William Paston (1379-1444), son of a peasant farmer, successful lawyer, royal judge and skilled social networker who made the family fortune. The astute William was the ablest of the family and was the source of all its eventual prosperity, including the achievement in 1673 of the earldom of Yarmouth. Unfortunately the second Earl died virtually bankrupt and without heirs in 1732, extinguishing William Paston’s direct line. The second Earl’s executors, however, discovered an enormous trove of letters and documents dating from the end of the reign of Henry V through the reign of the first Tudor, Henry VII (about 1422 to 1509). The Paston Letters are unique among medieval English documents. They are incomparably more voluminous, extensive and personal than any other similar documents from the time.

The Letters were mainly written to serve the family’s unceasing efforts to protect and increase their new social standing and wealth, but they also give a rich picture of life in such violent times and great insight into the personal lives of Paston family members and associates. Nothing else comes close to revealing so much of the actuality of lives of the time as perceived by those who lived them. The Letters immortalized the Pastons and are invaluable to history, and Castor’s narrative is, of course, primarily based on the Letters, which she uses with great skill to construct a coherent story of more than three generations of Pastons, along with an epilogue on the family’s ultimate fate and a concise essay on the discovery and scholarship of the Letters. Castor is a gifted writer who makes her protagonists, both men and women, live for the reader.

The book does not directly concern the high politics of the day except as those politics affected the Pastons’ search for political patrons who might help them protect their property and social status. The great interest of the book to us is the intimate glimpse it gives of life in a provincial gentry family seeking to protect itself in perilous times. The great accomplishment of Ms. Castor is the ability with which she makes these people and their beliefs speak to us so that we share their vanished world. As always the past is a foreign country where things are done differently indeed; but, thanks to Ms. Castor's skill, today's reader has an able and eloquent guide to those foreign parts. An outstanding book.

“What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East”, by Bernard Lewis

186 pages, Harper Perennial, ISBN-13: 978-0060516055

If you are a cultural relativist, who arrogantly places yourself “above it all” in refusing to judge the values which inform the way people behave collectively, or if you buy into the big lie that “Islam means peace” and that anyone who questions this must be a bigot, then Bernard Lewis is, of course, your nemesis. On the other hand, if you believe it’s not a coincidence that most of the terrorism and barbarity occurring in the world today is committed by radical Muslims, then you will naturally wonder why. Something indeed went wrong; something happened, in the relationship of Muslims, particularly Arab Muslims, with the rest of the world.

In What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis attempts to answer that very question. Clearly and with historical rigor, he illuminates the ebbing of Muslim conquest and the subsequent self-imposed isolation of Muslim cultural and intellectual life from the rest of the world. With their aggression turned inward and left to seethe for centuries, the inevitable result is the psychopathic, atavistic mindset, bursting forth in its ugly, murderous manifestations we see almost daily. If you actually read Lewis rather than just react to an unflattering thesis, you will find his conclusions, if you are intellectually honest, to be powerful and compelling. Lewis’ scholarly style doesn't make for a gripping narrative, but the book is short, and the effort to stay with it is rewarded by Lewis’ insights. I notice that those who attack Lewis don’t attack his scholarship, only the conclusions he reaches. Historical obtuseness and intellectual dishonesty are hallmarks of these critics, and they are part of the problem.

This book should be categorized as one of Lewis’ most insightful. When the people of the west try to understand the current situation in the Middle-East they often rely on the sound bites and blame-casters they see on the television or read from in the newspapers. But the root of this hostility goes much deeper. As Lewis explains, the Muslims of today are struggling with the reality of what went wrong with the once great civilization that was Islam of the past. Bernard Lewis points to this struggle and suggests, the problem is not necessarily coming from outside (i.e., the Jews, the West, the apostates, the infidels, the Americans, etc.), but from inside. The question, he suggests, should not be, “who has done this to us”, but rather, “where have we gone wrong?” The point being: it’s so much easier to blame someone else for our problems; it’s often very hard to suggest that the problem may be us.

“The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror”, by Bernard Lewis

224 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-0812967852

The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror is a slim, elegantly written guide to the history the Islamic World that put into context some of the terrorist attacks committed by Islamist groups. The book was written in 2003 and was clearly intended to explain and put into context the terrible events on September 9^th 2001 when Al-Qaida suicide bombers deliberately killed thousands of people, including many non-Americans and even Muslims, in New York and Washington. The British-born and educated writer, Bernard Lewis, was a professor at Princeton University and an expert in the history of Islam and the Middle East. His understanding of this area of study led to him being consulted by George Bush in trying to understand the nature of the hatred that most Muslims apparently have to the United States of America despite that nation's efforts to bring peace and stability to the Middle East. Having read the book, the hopes of America succeeding in this enterprise appear forlorn to me.

My recent reading of books about this whole subject has put these contrasts into context. First of all, Lewis reminds us that Christianity and Islam are very similar faiths in which the similarities far outweigh the differences. We should not forget that the history of Christendom has seen many of its own atrocities. I believe that economic and social factors matter more than religious ones and get the feeling that had Islam spread to Europe 1,500 years ago and the Middle East remained Jewish/Christian, the ways of life and course of history would not have been different. In the writer’s view, the behavior of Islamists is not very “Islamic” at all: for example, the Koran specifically forbids suicide – so suicide bombing breaks all Islamic laws – and fatwas are not contracts to kill (e.g. a supposed blasphemer like Salman Rushdie), but simply legal judgments.

The most cogent explanation for the recent behavior of Islamists has been the unprecedented oil wealth enjoyed by Saudi Arabia which has enabled the spread of the Wahhabi sect of Islam, which has promulgated a particularly intolerant strain of belief. Many converts to the Islamic faith have learned their faith through this sect simply because it is the most active body even though it, to Lewis’ mind, distorts and selectively quotes the essential message (Lewis likens Wahhabi within Islam to the Ku Klux Klan within Christianity).

The Crisis of Islam ends on a chilling note: Lewis points out that Osama Bin Laden’s declaration of war against the US marked the resumption of the struggle for religious dominance of the world that began in the seventh century: “If the leaders of Al-Qaida can persuade the world of Islam to accept their views and their leadership, then a long and bitter struggle lies ahead, and not only for America…And a dark future awaits the world, especially the part of it that embraces Islam.”