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james_mordechai's review
4.0
Where should I start with this review of The Cradle and the Sword by Ben Thomas? Shall I start with the fact that this is not a novel but a collection of novellas and yet they feel like they are all part of the same story arc? Or shall I start with the most obvious cliche, that it's a story about the two most famous rivers that feels like a river? A river made of people, or should I say peoples, that flows through time.
This book is unlike anything that I/you read before. It's about thousands of years of history, tens of different civilizations, tens of stories, told in reverse. Exactly, you heard it. Instead of starting from the beginning, Eden, and move our way forward following the Big Arrow of Time, we start from the end, Persia and Greece, and we crawl backwards. This gives a strange feeling, like a tale of darwinian evolution that starts from the most complex animals and finishes with the most basic unicellular organism, the very first. I've never looked at history this way, and I'm certainly not going to look at it in the traditional way again. The more I read it the more I thought it resembled the Curious case of Benjamin Button, not because of the plot similarities but because of the way the story is told backwards. I can't explain why but I also saw some of the Fountain (2006 movie) in it. Perhaps the fact that there are several plots set in different times of history and yet they are all connected somehow.
Ben Thomas has managed to put history into prose and this is never an easy task. He has also managed to show off his deep knowledge of the subject without sounding didactic.
I'm well versed in Mesopotamian history and I consider myself a connoisseur of the Land of the Two Rivers, and yet Ben Thomas taught me what no other history book has ever taught me: we always think about a new civilization conquering another as a clean cut moment, like neat geological strata that can tell us the beginning and the end of a geological era. Instead there are many years, generations even, of mixing up, intertwining of the conquered and the conquerors. Sometimes in the case of Mesopotamia there are three or four civilizations living together side by side (although often the conquered lose all privileges and become lower casts, or worse slaves), speaking different languages, worshiping different gods.
What I can say is that I thoroughly enjoyed this journey through time and I strongly recommend it not only to the lovers of Mesopotamian history but to anyone that is curious about this magical land that suffered and still suffers countless of invasions and devastation.
This book is unlike anything that I/you read before. It's about thousands of years of history, tens of different civilizations, tens of stories, told in reverse. Exactly, you heard it. Instead of starting from the beginning, Eden, and move our way forward following the Big Arrow of Time, we start from the end, Persia and Greece, and we crawl backwards. This gives a strange feeling, like a tale of darwinian evolution that starts from the most complex animals and finishes with the most basic unicellular organism, the very first. I've never looked at history this way, and I'm certainly not going to look at it in the traditional way again. The more I read it the more I thought it resembled the Curious case of Benjamin Button, not because of the plot similarities but because of the way the story is told backwards. I can't explain why but I also saw some of the Fountain (2006 movie) in it. Perhaps the fact that there are several plots set in different times of history and yet they are all connected somehow.
Ben Thomas has managed to put history into prose and this is never an easy task. He has also managed to show off his deep knowledge of the subject without sounding didactic.
I'm well versed in Mesopotamian history and I consider myself a connoisseur of the Land of the Two Rivers, and yet Ben Thomas taught me what no other history book has ever taught me: we always think about a new civilization conquering another as a clean cut moment, like neat geological strata that can tell us the beginning and the end of a geological era. Instead there are many years, generations even, of mixing up, intertwining of the conquered and the conquerors. Sometimes in the case of Mesopotamia there are three or four civilizations living together side by side (although often the conquered lose all privileges and become lower casts, or worse slaves), speaking different languages, worshiping different gods.
What I can say is that I thoroughly enjoyed this journey through time and I strongly recommend it not only to the lovers of Mesopotamian history but to anyone that is curious about this magical land that suffered and still suffers countless of invasions and devastation.
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