Lost to the West is Riveting
I am immensely proud of my brother Lars Brownworth's book Lost to the West just released this week in paperback. It really is the armchair historian's introduction to some 1,100 years of forgotten history. It is quite an achievement to pack that many years into 300 some-odd pages and yet the book still begs to be read. Just look at some of these chapter titles: "Of Buildings and Generals", "Swords that Drip with Christian Blood", "Basil the Bulgar Slayer", "Death and his Nephew" and my personal favorite: "The Pegan Counterstroke". You can get a good feel for how this book just yanks you in by reading some of the first sentences. The prologue starts with:
"History isn't supposed to hinge on the actions of a single man..."
and chapter one starts with:
"The long-suffering people of the third-century Roman Empire had the distinct misfortune to live in interesting times..."
How can you not be drawn in? And then you start to get a sense of problems that just might become disastrous:
"The empire might have been profoundly transforming itself, but its citizens were oblivious to the change..."
and then:
"The death of their great enemy sent the Roman world into wild jubilation, but it did nothing to alleviate the true danger..."
From one blow that should surely extinguish the Byzantine flame to the height of human civilization, and then back again, the book reads like a novel. But you could never make this stuff up.
To cap it all off, the West owes an incalculable debt directly to the Byzantine world. From simultaneously sheltering the classics from the ravages of a hostile enemy and a dark age Europe to the basis for the modern Western legal system today, it is hard to point out anything in the West that hasn't been influenced in some way by the Byzantines. Yet few could even frame the argument. And how can we hope to understand the Middle East without understanding the civilization that sat at the crossroads of East and West for over a thousand years? How did we just forget about this? Why isn't this taught in the history classes of every school?
Read this book. If it doesn't get you fired up, I don't know what will.
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To send a trackback, use the URL of this story appending ?page=tb at the end.Comments (1)
Oliver from Flushing/NY/USA
I second what you have stated. Everyone should get the hardcover, paperback, or audiobook version of Lost to the West.
People, this book helps unveil more of the history of the Roman Empire of the Middle Ages and shows that the Roman Empire did not end with the fall of the western half of the Empire of 476, but that it continued in the Eastern half till the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the fall of Trebizond in 1461.
Get it now! Trust me, it will definitely be worth the read.
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