Worlds at War

The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West

By: Anthony Pagden

Narrated by: John Lee

Length: 20 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

In the tradition of Jared Diamond and Jacques Barzun, prize-winning historian Anthony Pagden presents a sweeping history of the long struggle between East and West, from the Greeks to the present day.

The relationship between East and West has always been one of turmoil. In this historical tour de force, a renowned historian leads us from the world of classical antiquity, through the Dark Ages, to the Crusades, Europe's resurgence, and the dominance of the Ottoman Empire, which almost shattered Europe entirely. Pagden travels from Napoleon in Egypt to Europe's carving up of the finally moribund Ottomans - creating the modern Middle East along the way - and on to the present struggles in Iraq.

Throughout, we learn a tremendous amount about what "East" and "West" were and are, and how it has always been competing worldviews and psychologies, more than religion or power grabs, that have fed the mistrust and violence between East and West. In Pagden's dark but provocative view, this struggle cannot help but go on.

©2008 Anthony Pagden (P)2008 Tantor

Critic reviews

"An accessible and lucid exploration of the history of the East-West split....Fans of Jacques Barzun and Jared Diamond will be most impressed by Pagden's big picture perspective." ( Publishers Weekly)

Compelling analysis, but factually unreliable

Presents the compelling argument that Europe and the middle east have been culturally divided since pre-history, irrespective of which empires and religions have ruled them. Main concern is the author is careless to the point of amateurish with his fact(oid) checking. These are rarely central to his thesis but do detract from its impact. (ie "'Veni vidi vici' uttered by Julius Caesar after his conquest of Britain' - um, no, he reputedly said them of Pontus, and his brief incursion into Britain was anything but a conquest)

Informative and easily read

An interesting source of information about the relationship and the history of conflicts between east and west reaching the present age. Religion occupies a significant portion of its content answering a lot of questions regarding the current status quo.

I highly recommend it.

He write, and writes increasingly boring compilati

Would you try another book from Anthony Pagden and/or John Lee?

No

What was your reaction to the ending? (No spoilers please!)

Tiredness

What three words best describe John Lee’s performance?

machine-like

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

Never!!!

Any additional comments?

I would gladly return it, but since I alredy returned two books, I only wrote this review

Great story, with a lot of unfamiliar names

This is a great story -- as the cover of the book says, it's the 2500-year history of conflict between East and West. The geographical locations are actually a bit more specific than that: the East is the Middle East (the Persian Empire, the the Safavid Empire, the Ottoman Empire); the West is mostly Western Europe (Greece, Rome, Spain, France, Germany). The history is partly political and military, and partly intellectual: all the great battles are here, but considerable space is also given, for example, to the ideas about "Orientalism" that spread through Europe in the 18th century. The narrative moves rapidly and includes a rich amount of surprising detail.

Then there are the names. One of the strengths of the book is also one of its weaknesses, at least as an audiobook. I've read a lot of world history, but even so I found the book loaded with unfamiliar names, many of them Arabic, French, or Spanish (a good thing, since I was hoping to learn something new); and I found it difficult at times, with John Lee's very posh and precise pronunciation, to visualize the spelling (a bad thing). I discovered in the process that I'm a much more visually-oriented learner than I realized. (I got around the problem by checking the book out of the library and looking stuff up.)

Compared to Pagden's "Peoples and Empires," also available here, this is both longer and more focused: it doesn't try to tell all of world history, just as much as possible about this one aspect of it. John Lee is a great narrator, and it's an absorbing and rewarding listen.

Good history

Well-read audiobook. The place names are often difficult because of their relative obscurity to our current history texts. In many cases, further study must start with a Web-search for the persons mentioned to discover the spelling of the places mentioned.

The major downside of this book is the author's militant secular viewpoint. The thesis of the book seems to contain only the factious and warlike nature of religion throughout history, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim. As this is a book on conflict between the East and West, that would be understandable if it stopped there. The author however, through frequent asides and careful choice of adjectives, displays his disdain for Christianity and Islam. As this is a scholarly work, the bias may be founded in his academia, but it is, nonetheless, a clear and ubiquitous bias.

Probably not a good read for high-schoolers or younger.

Interesting...

This book took a disinterested look at two thousand conflict between east and west and contains vast amount of interesting information. But because the scope is quite big, so some details might be skipped, but overall, a good book.

Great read ... until the last 1/4th

This is a great review of history in the regions where East and West meet, but though it starts out successfully drawing big-picture trends and conclusions about the interaction and differences between Eastern and Western civilizations, it loses focus in the last 1/4 or so (the last 100-150 yrs) and starts became a sort of indirect rant against organized religion, especially Islam, with a clear bias towards the West. This book suffers from a syndrome many such big-picture history books encounter: it is unable to draw trends and conclusions from recent history and hence spends much more time on the more minor details the more recent the history. It is admittedly hard to distill conclusions from recent history when time hasn't done its part to weed out irrelevant details, and so this book falls into a familiar trap. I was expecting some deep analysis of how the last century or so of east-west relations fits into all the patterns identified in previous centuries/millenia, but the book just starts repeating dry historical details will jumping around (chronologically and geographically) and then, suddenly, it's the epilogue. It seems like the author could have used another year or so working on the last couple chapters to develop a more coherent thesis that integrates modern east-west history. The American role, especially prelevant in the last 100-150 years, gets only a secondary treatment, and no overarching East vs West paradigm can be obtained without including the changes this nation has brought about in East vs West relations.

Also, one big gaping whole in this analysis: the East is really the Muslim East and hence neglects China, Japan, and SE Asia with only occassional reference to India. it's strange to me to talk about East vs West but then neglect so many countries that the West clearly agrees are East. A better name for this book might have been the Middle East vs the West.

The book is worth a read, but reaches its height around the Crusades and the collapse of the Byzantine empire/growth of the Ottoman empire, and thereafter becomes more tedious, scattered, and less compelling.

Excellent historical account and analysis

An excellent accounting of the long and violent struggle between East And West. Worth the time and the effort! Thank you.

An excellent synopsis of East-West history

Extremely worthwhile read for anyone who is curious about the roots of the conflict which fills our newspapers with terrorist attacks and Western airstrikes on a near daily basis.

Starting at the beginning of recorded history, long before the coming of Christianity and Islam, The books thoroughly traces the long history of animosity in conflict between fundamentally different civilizations. In so doing, it leaves the reader with a greater understanding, if not optimism about, of the current geocultural situation.

A Devastating, Deep, and Dreadful Truth

This book had not been recommended to me; I chose it as a lark, a way to use my credit this month to explore a more general, broad-strokes assessment of historical conflict. What I found when I had finished the piece a day and a half later was a chilling, accurate, and altogether revolutionary look at the conflict between east and west trough history, and how they have shaped and altered so much. The tensions herein approached are spilling over once more into the conflict of our days, and any who look at the invasion of Iraq, or other, similar endeavors, as altogether favorable, must reassess their values and heir hopes.