Friday, February 16, 2018

Review: The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution by Patrick N. Allitt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Professor Allitt is great. I've listened to several of his courses, he's a great lecturer: informative, humorous, and balanced. This history of the industrial revolution does a thorough job of explaining the historical precursors, the key individuals involved, and the progress and effects of the revolution up through contemporary times. The first half of the lectures are focused on the developments in Britain. The second half moves into the US, Europe and then the industrialization of other parts of the world. There are focuses on important inventions: the steam engine, automobile, flight, electricity. Allitt also looks at the impact of industrialization on the art, politics, economics, war, and the environment.

I highly recommend this course -- and any course by Professor Allitt.


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Wednesday, February 07, 2018

Review: My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There are many hard truths in this book; things that cannot and should not be ignored. I don’t always agree with Shavit’s conclusions about how to deal with these truths or what they mean in the bigger picture but I think it is important that they be faced. These sometimes myth-busting, sometimes disturbing stories pose deep challenges to those who, like me, grew up on the standard Jewish-American discourse about Israel. That is not to say it is revisionist or offering a history that was previously unknown. But what Shavit is able to do is put a human face on all sides of the history of Israel. This makes it harder, for example, to downplay or dismiss a tragedy as just an unfortunate consequence of a war. It makes the tragedy personal and thus much more real to the reader. (That said, this very poignancy can also distort one’s thinking about the issues by pulling too much at the personal—this is a paradox of thinking about these kinds of issues. You can’t ignore the personal for the sake of a comprehensive, principled account, but bringing in the personal has a way of putting too much on weight on the personal stories at the expense of objectivity.)

Shavit’s journey through the history, demography, and geography of Israel is deeply personal. It is not a detailed work of history or policy analysis. Shavit selects certain points of history and certain individuals and tells us their story. In many ways it is, necessarily, incomplete and piecemeal. What ties the book together is the way that Shavit brings these threads together to form his vision of the past and potential future of Israel.

Shavit seems to be writing this book to answer questions about Israel: Why was Israel necessary? How did it get built? What impact did this have on the people in Israel (Arab and Jewish alike)? How has Israel survived and flourished? How has Israel (and Israelis) changed over decades of its existence? What explains these changes? What do these changes and the forces behind these changes mean for the future?

I don’t think one walks away from this book with definitive answers to any of these questions. One gets a sense of Shavit’s answers—but given the personal nature of the book these are not offered as _the_ answers and Shavit doesn’t present us with arguments to justify these answers. But the necessity of raising these questions and thinking about them is what makes this book important.



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