![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() There's only one other book in this space, "From Dawn to Decadence," by Jacques Barzun. Don't look for maps or photographs in this Penguin Paperback the text alone is six hundred pages. The complex syntax is that of a French intellectual of the sixties, and it is retained in Mayne's text, but you become accustomed to it. Braudel's translator, Richard Mayne had his job cut out for him. And don't be tempted to skip the "soft" introductory chapters with titles like "The Study of Civilization Involves All the Social Sciences," and "The Continuity of Civilizations." These tee up the hard topics, like "The Greatness and Decline of Islam." There's method in Braudel's approach, and it takes patience. Even subsequent to "A History of Civilizations," other historians have been unable to write a thematic survey that matches this original. It captures the historical flow that evolves civilizations, sacrificing only the detail outside the themes. Braudel's was a pioneering effort in multidisciplinary historical analysis. ![]() Previous histories drilled deep into one facet of history. In retrospect that disapprobation was the kind of seal of approval that "banned in Boston" came to embody. When Fernand Braudel originally published this text in the sixties, he became a pariah at the Sorbonne. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |