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Lost to the West

the Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization
rod368
Jun 20, 2011rod368 rated this title 1 out of 5 stars
Interesting subject, poor execution. The prose is crammed with cliches, mixed metaphors, ill-suited similes, vague yet trumpeting superlatives, redundancy, and excess verbiage of every sort. Rare is the sentence unburdened by these off-putting qualities. I found myself constantly mentally rewriting what I was reading into a cleaner, crisper form. I hate to abandon a book, but I nearly did this one, and must admit I simply skimmed the final 2 chapters. In addition to these literary sins, the authorial bias in favour of Christianity (vs. Islam), Byzantium (vs. any other empire), and Great Men (vs. the horrors the ordinary person must have endured throughout this bloody history) became so heavy by the end that the elegiac tone was unmoving and even irritating. I wonder what the author makes of the Islamic Golden Age that rose and fell in al-Andalus (modern-day Andalusia in Spain) during the same period?