Carolyn Nelson

Storming the Heavens: Soldiers, Emperors, and Civilians in the Roman Empire: Santosuosso, Antonio: Boulder: Westview Press, 265 pp., Publication Date: September 2001

Other chapters include “Byzantium” (largely on Justinian), “The Parting of the Ways” (on the rise of Islam), “The Forging of Islamic Culture,” “Byzantine Iconoclasm,” and “Byzantium and the West.” The material is familiar. But Michael Angold manages to infuse facts, figures, and images with new interest-largely due to his agreeable writing style and careful selection of matter. His incursions into early Islam bring into focus the two clashing cultures, Byzantine and Muslim, their similarities (astonishing as this may sound) and the predictable contrast, primarily religious. Here 1 note the nice touch on page 61: “The Ilmayyads’ adoption, via the Ghassanids, of princely art and architecture was part of an experiment to create an ambience that suited their ambitions and achievements. It may have earned them a bad reputation, but a hedonistic lifestyle was to remain a feature of Muslim princely culture, in marked contrast with the austerity of Islam.” One may add that little has changed since in this respect. Two welcome additions render Byzantium particularly valuable: an epilogue on the complex but fascinating Norman Sicily delineates the island as a meeting point of Christianities (Latin and Greek) and Islam, and a test case of Angold’s main hypothesis of the irrcvcrsible rift in Mediterranean culture and landscape that characterizes the “early Middlc agc.” A prologue of sorts, “Notes for Travellers,” suggests sites for actual visits. Angold’s book is a useful addition to the growing body of histories of Byzantium, such as Norwich’s trilogy (Byzantium: The Early Centuries, 1989; The Apogee, 1992; The Decline and Full, 1996) and Treadgold’s voluminous and now concise survey (A History ofthe Byzantine State and Society, 1997; A Concise History r

The Library of Alexandria: Rediscovering the Cradle of Western Culture: MacLeod, Roy, ed.: London: I. B. Tauris, 196 pp., Publication Date: February 2000

Byzcintium, 2001). It is, however, more compact and perhaps more accessible. My only reservation is the book’s relativc “conservatism.” Because it is arranged largely chronologically, there are only a few comments on aspects that may interest contemporary readers beyond the basic expanded outline of events, personalities, and the physical landscape. I refer, for example, to histories of minorities and to polemics. A comparison between the Jewish communities under Byzantine Christianity and Islam would have rendered the description of the two cultures more meaningful and pcrhaps more actual. Likewise, the issue of polemics, between Muslims and Christians or bctween Jews and Christians under Islam, provides valuable insights into social interaction and intellectual history, both of which are absent from Angold’s book (see D. J . Lasker and S. Strournsa, The Polemir ojllrestor the Priest, Jerusalem 1996). Indeed, such polemics demonstrate the continuing interest of Jews living in Islamic countries in Christianity, a tribute to the vitality of the Christian culture that Angold traces. Thcre are no footnotes, and the bibliography is very basic and conspicuously lacking

Augustus (B.) Levick Augustus. Image and Substance . Pp. xxiv + 351, ills, maps. Harlow: Longman, 2010. Paper, £21.99. ISBN: 978-0-582-89421-1.

tory, is discussed in the remaining three chapters, which together take up half of the book. Roberts walks us through the turbulent events that constructed contemporary China: opium wars, rebellions, collapse of the Qing dynasty, warlordism, civil war, and the founding and unfolding of the Nationalist government in 1928 and the Communist regime in 1949. The strength of Roberts’s book lies in the balanced and objective presentation, as he expertly negotiates his way through controversial aspects of Chinese history. The general readershipthe intended audience-will find a lucid survey history with a competent, interpretive perspective, not based on the active primary research of the author but on Roberts’s expert synthesis of secondary sources in English. As such Roberts’s volume is a welcome addition but falls short of two more academic general histories: Patricia Ebrey’s Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and John FairbanMerle Goldman’s China, A New History (Harvard University Press, 1998).