Books in Brief
The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by Thomas E. Woods Jr. (Regnery, 280 pp., $19.95). It is not surprising that a history guide written by a professor with an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a doctorate from Columbia made it onto the New York Times bestseller list. What is surprising--refreshingly so--is that a text that challenges the liberal canon has so resonated with the American public.
The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History provides a compelling rebuttal to the liberal sentiment encrusted upon current history texts. Covering American history from 1629 to 2002 in eighteen concise chapters, Woods's book offers an immediately accessible response to false assertions about the history of America. In less than a minute one can find and demonstrate, for example, that it was not an obstructionist minority that caused the United States Senate not to ratify the League of Nations Treaty in 1920. In short, when your history teacher, or your dinner guest, or your debate opponent propounds the usual drivel, you can whip out the book and say, "Hold on. What about this?" Highlighted inserts throughout the text enhance this access, including references to "Books You Are Not Supposed to Read," and pertinent quotations from historical figures.
The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History is ultimately about truth. Chapter 12, for instance, is entitled: "Yes, Communist Sympathizers Really Existed." This is a book everyone interested in American history should have in his library.
--James W. Haley Jr.
Salonica: City of Ghosts by Mark Mazower (Knopf, 476 pp., $35). Mark Mazower, a scholar of Greek and Balkan history who teaches at Columbia University, has produced a hefty volume that will stand as a major, if incomplete, popular history of one of the most remarkable urban communities ever to exist. That is the port on the Aegean, known to its original Macedonian and Greek inhabitants as Thessaloniki, to its later Jewish, Turkish, and Albanian residents as Selânik, to the peoples of its Slav hinterland as Solun, and to the rest of the world as Salonica.
The city was a prize sought by many a military adventurer over the millennia, but the most remarkable chapter in its epic doubtless began at the end of the fifteenth century, with decisions by the Ottoman sultans to rescue the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal. The Sephardic Jews were resettled throughout the Turkish empire, but Salonica became their center, remaining more than three-quarters Jewish until the first decades of the twentieth century.
With the Greek defeat of the Turks and the withdrawal of the Muslim power, the Sephardim were soon found to be a nuisance rather than an asset. A terrible fire destroyed most of the city's center in 1917, and in 1943 the Nazis transported the great majority of the remaining Jews to the flames of Auschwitz.
Ottoman Salonica was a special place in which religion, identity, and law were remarkably fluid. The Islamic mystics of the Sufi orders, the Christian worship of saints, and Jewish esoterism drew the people of Salonica together, rather than separating them, and many cases were known of those who stepped back and forth between the three faiths without much trouble.
Salonica is indeed a city of ghosts today, which is a pity, for its past offers much to study. Mazower has made a major contribution, with only a few minor errors and gaps--above all, he might have given more attention to the Jewish theological legacy of Salonica, which is considerable. But this is a book worth reading by anybody interested in the coexistence of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity--and interested in a single small but glorious place.
--Stephen Schwartz