February 7, 2008
Why book reviews matter
If you're still wondering why book reviews matter, there's an excellent piece written by Joan Acocella in the Feb. 4 issue of The New Yorker.
The piece itself does not say anything specifically about book reviews or literary criticism. It's actually just superb example of both.
Acocella wrote about David Levering Lewis's “God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215” (Norton). The book digs into the medieval history of Islam and specifically focuses on the years of Muslim rule on the Iberian peninsula beginning in the early 700s. The time period includes the 'Golden Age of Jewish Culture in Spain' when Jews were more or less accepted into society and several Jewish poets and philosophers published some of their best works.
Indeed, it has been said that the Muslims treated all of their non-Muslim subjects with equanimity during their rule in Spain. It's an idea called the convivencia, or “living together” in spite of differences and Acocella says this concept is at the center of “God's Crucible.” However, the measure of Muslim tolerance towards their non-Muslim subjects has been a matter of debate among historians.
And that is why I am pointing to this article out as an example of why criticism matters. Acocella deftly puts the book into a literary context and lets the reader understand why it may have been written with the aim of revising history and impacting the present as much as it was trying to tell the story of Islam co-existing with its neighbors in medieval Spain. Here's more from Acocella:
If, as Edward Said wrote, the old history books were covertly ideological, the current ones tend to be overtly ideological, as each new generation of scholars rides in to rescue supposedly worthy peoples who were wronged by earlier scholarship and, in their time, by axe-wielding conquerors. But all these peoples, or all the ones in Lewis’s book, were conquerors. If the Christians took Spain from the Muslims, the Muslims had taken it from the Visigoths, who had appropriated it from the Romans, who had seized it from the Carthaginians, who had thrown out the Phoenicians. Lewis does not pretend that the Muslims were not conquerors; he simply justifies their conquest on the ground of their belief in convivencia, a pressing matter today. I can foresee a time when another matter important to us, the threat of ecological catastrophe, will prompt a historian to write a book in praise of the early Europeans whom Lewis finds so inferior to the Muslims. The Franks lived in uncleared forests, while the Muslims built fine cities, with palaces and aqueducts? All the better for the earth. The Franks were fond of incest? Endogamy keeps societies small, prevents the growth of rapacious nation-states. The same goes for the Franks’ largely barter economy. Trade such as the Muslims practiced—far-flung and transacted with money—leads to consolidation. That’s how we got global corporations.
Each new problem in our history engenders a revision of past history. Many of today’s historians acknowledge this, and argue that their books, if politicized, are simply more honest about that than the politicized books of the past. This pessimism about the possibility of finding a stable truth may be realistic, but it seems to sanction, even encourage, special pleading—of which “God's Crucible,” for all its virtues, is an example.
Maybe this is just a critic doing what a critic does well. But, in an age when so many book review sections are being cut at newspapers around the country, I felt like it was important to trot out a good example of reviewing. Books impact society and critics play an important role in deciding how much or how little influence an author deserves. A good critic gives credit where credit is due, points out inaccuracies in a book and, as we see here, tries to sort out a writer's motives. Without them, we'd have fewer filters through which history would pass. And in a free society where people can and do say whatever they want, it's important to have those types of stop gaps to prevent the infection of ideology from spreading too far into an area where it does not belong.