This book is way more than the maps. It starts with Borders Throughout History going back to ancient times when borders were not clearly defined. Modern borders emerged with modern cartography. The “more detailed the map, the more accurately boundaries can be drawn.” Cultural borders based on religion, language and such rarely align with actual modern borders. Think about places you know and who lives there and the cultural and religious differences. The first maps show Borders in Six Stages delineating the changing borders before 1800 to current borders.
The next set shows Borders and Civilizations–what we often refer to as Western Civilization, Latin American, Orthodox Christian, Islamic, African, Hindu, Sinic, Buddhist, Japanese. This view started with the book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996). In many ways this Atlas is also a history book on how various agreements and treaties affect boundary changes. An example is the map of the results of The Sykes-Picot Agreement. It also includes the legacy of the British Empire and how this affected borders over time.
I had not thought much about how even after colonialism, Europe still has some over seas territories, mostly islands over which wars have been fought even though many have never heard of them. The book includes maps and discussion on border disputes in Latin America as well as other parts of the world. There is another section on sea borders and those disputes continue today, e.g. the Arctic which many countries try to claim. And then there is the Persian Gulf with detailed illustrations of the Strait of Hormuz and all the islands there. I had forgotten that Bahrain is an island until I read this book.
There are too many sections to detail here, but the maps of the South China Sea and the disputes involving China there are very illustrative of just how complex claims by countries can be.
When I think of walls, I think of Berlin Wall and its fall and the disputes in US over walls between US and Mexico, but there are others in the world–Morocco, the Koreas. There is a map illustrating all the places where walls exist today. There are more than 70 closed borders protected by a wall or fence. The number of barriers is rising. The book not only lists them but how high they are in meters. Then so many disputed borders still exist that the maps and lists take up two pages of lists.
There is so much interesting information in this book that I cannot recommend it enough for anyone interested in history and current affairs.
While waiting for a requested book to arrive at the library, I found this one and decided to read it. Because of personal interest I already knew quite a lot of about different types of Islam and some of the history, but this book goes into great detail explaining the founding and history of different groups, e.g. Sunni including different groups within Sunni Islam, Sufi, Shia. Sunni groups vary greatly from more mainstream to the very strict fundamentalism of the Salafis/Wahhabis which is the group controlling Saudi Arabia. The Shia are predominantly in Iran, Iraq, some of Syria, and are minorities in most of the Gulf States as well as Saudi Arabia. Sufis can be found all over the Muslim world, and in the West people often equate them with the whirling dervishes.
A bit of history many in the West do not know is how Mohamed Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, joined with the ancestor of the current Saudi rulers to conquer and control all of Saudi Arabia in the 1700s. This extreme conservative part of Islam is still the rule and law in Saudi Arabia. It is such a potent force in the world today because Saudi Arabia has spent billions to export their preferred form of Islam across the world. Osama bin Laden belonged to this group of Muslims. They have built mosques and training schools all over the world. Some adherents feel it is their obligation to kill others who do not agree with them including other Muslims. al-Wahab’s book, Kitab al-Tawhid, The Book of Oneness, dominates the global market and promotes this strict form of Islam. It is from this form of Islam that ISIS and other groups have arisen. Most Sunni Muslims in the world do not adhere to this form of Islam. Many people do not realize that the majority of Muslims are not Arabs.
The author also explains the rise in jihadism with recommendations on how to deal with Islamic extremism. Part of this goes into the history of early Islam when for hundreds of years much of the progress in a lot of the world was via Muslim science, mathematics, literature, etc. Part Three details The Rise of the West and the Loss of Muslim Confidence which has led to anger and frustration and a strong sense of humiliation which has lead to much of the extremism occurring now and recently.
Although I do not agree with some of the author’s statements and claims because of what I know from Muslims I do know, I highly recommend this book. I think many people in the West have little to no knowledge regarding Muslims, the history, etc. Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world currently and it behooves people to gain understanding.
When I was in the eighth grade, I asked my parents for two books for Christmas, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”. I am sure even then there was a more modern version but they chose Dryden’s translation which was basically 17th century British. It took me a while, but I read them both even though I often had to resort to using the dictionary to learn all the words I had never seen before. My favorite then and now is “The Iliad”, the story of Achilles and the Trojan War. Since then, I have read more books than I can count about Achilles and the war, including this one and three recently by Pat Barker, which I wrote about on this blog.
David Malouf focuses on two characters, Achilles and Priam and one singular event, Priam’s decision to disguise himself as an ordinary person, hire an ordinary man with an ordinary cart, and go to the Greek camp and beg Achilles for Hector’s body. The only other main character in the book is the cart driver who likes to talk and share. From him Priam sees another view of life and experiences some new simple things, like cooling your feet in a stream, eating ordinary food. Priam suddenly realizes he has missed much of life’s meaning since, as king, he has been shielded from the lives of most people. The book includes Priam’s thoughts, those of the cart driver, and Achilles’. This is not an action thriller novel. It is the story of three people and their thoughts and reactions to this one event.
“What are you willing to give up to alleviate someone else’s suffering?”
This book won the National Book Award for Non-fiction in 2025. I started reading it before book four but had to take a break. It is very serious and details a lot of dreadful recent and not so recent history. The author discusses in detail the gap between Western ideals and the reality the West enacts using examples from Gaza, his stint as a journalist in Afghanistan and other war torn places. He notes the betrayals of free speech, the betrayals of indigenous people, the betrayals of people of African descent. Some parts talk about reckoning and questions whether such will occur, who will remember, and will it matter and to whom.
El Akkad was born in Egypt, but grew up in Qatar and Canada as the family followed wherever his father was able to find work. He now lives in the US and states his current home is his 17th or 18th. His family had to move so much he remains uncertain.
This is a serious read for people who want to think about what has occurred in the last 20-30 years, what is occurring presently, and how all this will affect the future.
The daughter of a diplomat and historian explores books in her father’s library one evening and discovers an ancient book and a bunch of yellowing letters. These letters are those of one of her father’s advisors in graduate school, a man who suddenly disappeared. The center of the book contains a strange dragon drawing. This discovery leads her on a quest to find out more about her father’s past and the fate of a mother she has never known.
The letters involve the evil history of Vlad the Impaler who is the person behind the legend of Dracula. Vlad the Impaler was ruler of what is now part of Romania. In his efforts to retain power and fight off the Turks, whom he hated, his cruelty became legend. Often he impaled his enemies alive on stakes driven through their bodies and lined them up by the hundreds along the roadsides.
Combining reality and the legend of Dracula and vampires, this book’s main character, the daughter of the historian, leads the reader from London to Amsterdam to Istanbul to various parts of Romania and Bulgaria in search of the truth of her father’s past and the supposed death of her mother. Although it is a vampire story (I am not a vampire fan), it is much more; it is a fascinating trek through a part of history few know much about and about which little has been written.
Note: I doubted I would finish it by year’s end because this novel is 642 pages long. However, I found the story and history so compelling that I finished it before Christmas.
A young woman, Alexandra, travels to Sofia, Bulgaria, for a job as an English teacher in part to help her recover from the strange disappearance (and probably death) of her brother. She has barely arrived when she helps an elderly couple and the man with them. By accident she ends up with an urn of ashes in a bag when her luggage and theirs gets a bit mixed up. The ashes are inside an ornately and unusually carved box with the name Stoyan Lazarov engraved on it. She sets out to find them with the help of a young cab driver.
As they set out on this journey, they discover they are being followed but have no idea why. The cab driver whom she calls Bobby has keen observation skills which mystify her at first. They find part of the family and then unfortunate things occur to many they meet who are relatives or are connected to the man whose name is on the box. Without initially realizing it, they become involved in Bulgarian politics and political corruption as they try to unravel the story of the box and the man whose ashes it contains.
As I read this novel, which is both a lesson on the horrible Soviet occupation of Bulgaria and human determination and resilience, I became entranced with the history and culture of Bulgaria. If you want a glimpse into another culture and its history and the beauty of the Bulgarian landscape, I highly recommend this book. It is also a mystery story that keeps the reader going.
The author also wrote an earlier book called “The Historian” which is a novel about the history of Vlad the Impaler who is the real person behind the Dracula stories. I plan to read that novel as well.
As in Part One, I am only going to provide mostly quotes from the book.
The Rise of the New West:
“The demographic shift west continued with the Cold War. In all past wars, the nation had abruptly turned from military production to peacetime economy, but after WWII, the global tension between capitalism and communism continued to bolster the new war industries. Between 1950 and 1959, defense took up 62% of the federal budget as it expanded 246%, up to $228 billion annually, and much of that money moved west…Eisenhower, and after him, John F. Kennedy, expressed concern about the rising power of what Ike called ‘the military-industrial complex.’
“Westerners and southerners agreed that desegregation, which gave Black Americans benefits paid for by tax dollars, offered prime evidence of a communist conspiracy. In 1958, Welch, the chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers…started the John Birch Society, a secret organization with the goal of stopping the creep of communism…Welch attracted supporters by explaining that the civil rights movement roiling the country was really communism.”
“In the mid-1950s, the new television sets in all those new homes were tuned to Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza to see hard working white men fighting off evil, seemingly without help from the government…The shows all embraced the myth of the American West where cowboys worked hard, stood for what is right, and protected their women from bad men and Indians…the land unpeopled by anyone of color or women, except as they fit into the larger tale of the individualists.”
“Bozell started from the same point as James Henry Hammond had in South Carolina a century earlier, and for much the same reasons…the Constitution strictly limited the functions of government, and that restrictions on property holders were an infringement on liberty.”
“…a key Republican strategist, Kevin Phillips, identified Nixon’s election as the moment that marked the ending of the New Deal era.”
“…in 1967 men determined to stop the church from embracing rights for people of color and women launched a takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention…to turn religion away from the new ways and back to fundamentalism. These fundamentalist purged moderates, insisted on a literal interpretation of the Bible, barred women from positions of authority, and in 1998 oversaw an addition to the Baptist Faith and Message advising wives to ‘submit…graciously’ to their husbands.
“Milton Friedman explained that if the government stopped worrying about protecting workers and consumers and instead cut taxes and permitted money to accumulate at the top, wealthy people would invest in new businesses…This argument, which echoed precisely what the southern slaveholders had claimed, gained traction in the West, where blaming eastern liberals for the nation’s problems became an article of faith…In the 1970s, a secretive Christian organization know as The Family began to sponsor prayer meetings in businesses, colleges, and government. By the mid-1970s, they were effectively mobilizing white evangelicals as a voting bloc.”
Oligarchy Rides Again:
“When Reagan tapped the 35 year old Michigan Congressman David Stockman to be his Budget Director, Stockman, who had grown up on “Conscience of a Conservative’, set to bring Goldwater’s dream to life…The administration turned to tax cuts. When computer simulations at the Office of Management and Budget showed the proposed tax cuts would not increase revenues but instead would explode the deficit, Stockman simply reprogrammed the computers…To protect the tax cuts that lay at the heart of his vision, Reagan and his team supported…the plan to organize business leaders, evangelicals, and social conservatives into a political juggernaut.”
“Now in control of Congress, Gingrich’s Republicans set the terms of the political debate…In April 1995, an internal memo identified tax cuts as the central principle of Republicanism…and explained why: ‘All reductions in federal spending weaken the left in America….Defunding government is defunding the left.'”
“From the beginning in the 1950s, Movement Conservative leaders had recognized that they could not win over voters with policy, for the activist state they opposed was quite popular. So they shaped their message around vignettes that made a compelling story…leaders stayed in power by deliberately crafting a narrative that harked back to western individualism. The hardworking individual–the cowboy–was endangered by the behemoth state…They invoked the corollary to the American paradox, arguing that equality for women and people of color would destroy the freedom that lay at the heart of democracy.”
“Party operatives had talked of cutting down black voting under a ‘ballot integrity’ initiative in 1986, and they bitterly opposed a 1993 Democratic expansion of voting registration…The Florida legislature took the lead passing a voter ID law to ensure that everyone who voted was a US citizen…the Florida law quickly became a purge of black voters, people presumed to vote Democratic… (this was 1997) This purge paid off in the election of 2000, when George W. Bush of Texas ran against Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore…Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million votes but was four votes short of a win in the Electoral College…the 1998 purge would decide the election.”
What Then Is This America:
“In the 2018 midterm elections, female candidates began to articulate a new vision of the country to replace the old American paradox. They emphasized community and fairness over individualism and the race, class, and gender roles that individualism has always implied. Women and voters of color are helping redefine an America for the twenty-first century…In 1612, English colonists were starving in Virginia…One hundred and seventy-five years later, America’s Founders put that idea into practice in what George Washington called a ‘great experiment’: a government based on the idea that human beings had the right to determine their own fate. Could such a government endure? Our country’s peculiar history has kept the question open.”
Rather than summarize or evaluate, I am going to provide some quotes from the book. I will say that if you want to understand the current state of affairs in the United States of America, this book provides excellent insights based on history.
From the Introduction:
“America began with a great paradox: the same men who came up with the radical idea of constructing a nation on the principle of equality also owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior…it was a key figure of the new democratic republic…the ringing phrase ‘all men are created equal’ did not actually include everyone. In 1776, it seemed self-evident to leaders that not every person living in the British colonies were capable or worthy of self determination. In their mind, women, slaves, Indians, and paupers depended on the guidance of men like themselves…So long as these lesser people played no role in the body politic, everyone within it would be equal. The principle of equality depended on inequality. That central paradox–that freedom depended on racial, gender, and class inequality–shaped American history as the cultural, religious, and social patterns of the new nation grew around it.”
From The Triumph of Equality:
“The accomplishment of white male equality under the law was extraordinary…They argued that their new system made their new nation different from the Old World, which was split between a corrupt aristocracy and the lazy poor.”
“On March 4, 1858, prominent South Carolina slaveholder James Henry Hammond gave a speech in the Senate–to which he had been elected the year before despite the fact that he admitted two years earlier he had sexually assaulted his four young nieces…The greatest strength of the South was not its economy…but rather ‘the harmony of her political and social institutions.’ Every society had ‘a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life’…the people who make up the ‘mudsill of society supporting that other class that leads progress, civilization, and refinement.’ The men in the latter group are wealthy and well connected…In the South whites had made an ‘inferior race into mudsills, dull but loyal people who are content to have their labor directed by their betters.”
“Now a national figure, Lincoln articulated a democratic vision for America, one that refuted the mudsill version of Senator Hammond…he explained that Hammond’s theory divided the world into permanent castes: capitalists driving the economy and workers stuck at the bottom.”
The West:
The last stand of the Alamo became the foundational event for western American history, offering a vision of self-sacrifice and heroism. It prompted the formation of the Republic of Texas, and inspired Texans under Sam Houston to defeat Santa Anna’s troops…In the retelling of what happened at the Alamo, what got lost was the reality that the defenders were rebelling against the Mexican government in Mexican territory, and that they were fighting to defend the right to enslave people. The myth also ignored the fact that many of the defenders were Mexican opponents of Santa Ana, and that some of the defenders–including Davy Crockett–surrendered.”
Cowboy Reconstruction:
After Lincoln’s death, Johnson wanted no part of Lincoln’s and the “Union’s democratic vision. To rebuild the South, Johnson turned not to the Army, or to the ex-slaves who had supported the Union, but to former Confederates. He offered pardons to all but 1500 Confederate leaders…states codified the racial violence that swept across the South in the summer of 1865. As employers cheated workers out of wages, gangs beat and raped African Americans into submissive behavior, and whites attacked their black neighbors, southern state legislatures created the Black Codes.”
The West and The South Join Forces:
“The resurgence of the South’s ideology came from the nation’s new bloc: the western states. Easterners had made the mistake of thinking the westerners would join their coalition, only to discover that due to their peculiar history and extractive economy , westerners had more in common with white antebellum southerners than with easterners. By the 1890s a few wealthy men dominated western society. Poor white men had little opportunity. people of color and women even less, and leaders worked to keep it that way. Still, as in the East before the Civil War, the myth of the individualist convinced Americans that the west was the land of opportunity…Theodore Roosevelt’s war record took the western ideal and put it on the national stage. By the end of the century, Americans embraced the cowboy image and vowed to spread it across the globe, putting into law that some people are better than others. Once again freedom was hierarchical.
“In the early part of the twentieth century, southern towns began to erect statues of Confederates, making them into western style heroes and individualists. The rewriting of the past created momentum for women’s suffrage…Rebecca Latimer Felton was a reformer who wanted educational and prison reform as well as women’s suffrage. She was also in favor of lynching her black neighbors who wanted equal rights…The Ku Klux Klan reformed and rebounded in the 1920s…Meanwhile in the West, immigrants and Indians were falling victim to a legal system that established castes. In Texas, officials were hardening a racial system that classified migrants across the Mexican border by race. In Arizona, a state law singled out ‘treason against the state’ as punishable by death aimed at Apache and Navahos who might fight the legal system ensnaring them. In Oklahoma…corrupt legislators arranged affairs to steal valuable land from Indians.
Piketty is Professor of Economics at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales and Paris School of Economics. Sandel is a Professor of Government at Harvard University. This small book (119 pages) is the discussion between the two on the value of equality. In this discussion they debate what citizens and governments should do to narrow the economic gaps that separate people. This includes looking at the dangers of political instability and environmental issues. Rather than summarize their discussions, I am going to quote various parts:
“Mainstream politicians…have faith in the market because of a belief that markets deliver rising prosperity and yield Wall Street campaign contributions. A deeper reason…is that markets seem to offer a way of sparing us as democratic citizens from engaging in messy , contentious, and controversial debates about how to value goods and how to value the various contributions that people make to the economy and to the common good.”
“We live in pluralist societies. We disagree about the nature of the good life. We disagree about how to value goods.”
Because of the above, it is just easier to use the market and avoid the discourse as to what is worth more, the work of a teacher or a laborer or a hedge fund manager.
“Those on the left and those on the right may may well disagree about what counts as the dignity of work and how to promote it…many working people and many without university degrees feel that elites look down on them, don’t value the work they do…individual upward mobility is not an adequate answer to inequality.”
They discuss credentialing and note that the government spends billions more on higher education than technical education. They note that this form of credentialism is something that many see as an acceptable form of prejudice. A survey was done of prejudices in both Europe and the US:
“The group most disfavored by the respondents were the poorly educated.”
They discuss corporate tax rates and world wide efforts to have a world tax on multinational corporations:
“So, really, it’s a game between tax administrations in Washington, Paris, and Berlin to split some of the tax revenues that are now in tax havens among them, leaving aside the countries in the South.” –referring to the Southern Hemisphere where most of the poorest countries in the world exist. “Don’t companies have a patriotic duty to pay taxes and contribute to the common good in the country that makes their success possible?”
They view the success of far right groups and the election of Trump as more due to job losses in manufacturing than due to the inflow of migrants. They note an anti-immigrant view in places where there are even few immigrants and see it as related to the destruction of jobs:
“It’s not about immigration, but it’s about feeling looked down upon. It’s about recognition. It’s about dignity. Throughout this conversation, we’ve discussed three aspects of equality. One is economy, about the distribution of income and wealth. A second is political, about voice and power and participation. Then there is a third category, about ‘dignity,’ ‘status,’ ‘respect,’ ‘recognition,’ ‘honor,’ and ‘esteem.’ My hunch is that the third is the most powerful politically and maybe also morally. Any hope we have of reducing inequality in the first two dimensions, economically and politically, will depend on creating conditions for greater equality of recognition, honor, dignity,. and respect.”
The characters in the eight stories of this collection are people touched by violence of one sort or another, reflective of the violence that has occurred in Colombia’s history. A photographer’s obsession for a woman with a traumatic past, a writer’s fascination with the history of a woman whose grave is outside the official cemetery, two people whose own personal shared histories meet at a grandiose ceremony pretending they do not know each other–are examples of all the tales of complexity found in life and how morals change over time. These are not stories for the faint of heart. They do reveal how traditions of the past harmed people in ways that do not occur today, how lies can catch up with the liar, and how often pretending to be someone you are not often fails.
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