Book reviews in brief

Published on Thursday 14 May 2009 14:56

AN EDIBLE HISTORY OF HUMANITY BY TOM STANDAGE (Atlantic, £19.99)

THE idea that food might have shaped our destiny would have come as a surprise a generation ago: now it's taken as read that we make the march of history on our stomachs.

Just in the last few years we've had a number of sweeping surveys, along with books on apples, bagels, cocoa and much more, but those beginning to feel full up should make the effort to find room for just one more: Standage's highly readable, thought-provoking essay approaches the subject with a longer perspective and with a bit more detachment than has been the norm.

Such a standpoint shows how fundamentally food production has underpinned our existence – everything from settlement-patterns and social hierarchy to military strategy – and the ways in which, economically, we really are what we consume.

UNDERSTANDING PAINTINGS

BY PATRICK DE RYNCK

(Thames & Hudson, 19.95)

THE successor to How to Read a Painting (2004) looks specifically at Bible stories and classical myths: its methodology is an implicit – and perhaps well-founded – comment on our culture.

The most impious reader of a certain age is likely to be taken aback to find subjects sacred and profane being treated together, in alphabetical sequence – all so much artistic iconography, it seems.

Hence we move straight from "Abraham" to "Achilles", while "Christ" is sandwiched between "Cephalus and Phocris" and "Cimon and Pero". This oddity – if that's what it is – apart, it's a beautifully presented and genuinely useful book: De Rynk ably unpacks the significance of 200-odd masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance art.

SUMMER OF BLOOD

BY DAN JONES

(Harper, 20)

1381 WAS the year of the Peasants' Revolt: a misleading label, Jones points out, for a far more broadly based upsurge of unrest in a far more sophisticated society than has traditionally been assumed.

By the same token, this short, clear history of a long, hot summer is less an attempt at a definitive account than an introduction to the unexpected complexity of the age. John Ball's radicalism; rural-urban relations; aristocratic faction-fighting and fiscal policy: all made their contribution to a toxic – and finally explosive – brew.

THE CRISIS OF ISLAMIC CIVILISATION

by ALI A ALLAWI

(Yale, 18.99)

ISLAM has been trying for 200 years to come to terms with modernity, and the secularism it brought with it; the globalisation of more recent times has hardly helped. The outright assault of the high-colonialist period has given way to a more sinister economic domination and an empty consumerism that oppresses just as surely.

Muslims must themselves find the answers they have so far failed to come up with: Islam can offer much more than anger and radical puritanism, Allawi argues. What's been lost, and what has to be rediscovered, he says, is the spirituality that for so many centuries underpinned one of the greatest civilisations the world has ever seen.

This is a wide-ranging, readable and endlessly thought-provoking essay.