BOOK REVIEW:: Notes on a Century – WSJ
By MB Snow at May 13, 2012 | 12:09 am | Print
By ERIC ORMSBY -
It is all too tempting to describe Bernard Lewis, the distinguished historian of the Islamic world, as venerable. Mr. Lewis, who turns 96 on May 31, seems to possess the aura of the sage. Even his harshest critics have sometimes seen him in this light. After Mr. Lewis published a devastating critique of Edward Said’s “Orientalism” in 1982 in the New York Review of Books, the injured author responded with a long, angry letter to the editor that mocked Mr. Lewis’s “veneer of omniscient tranquil authority.”
An attentive reader of Mr. Lewis’s books would never come away thinking that omniscience or tranquillity was on conspicuous display. Whether writing about the early history of the Arabs or the development of the modern Turkish state, Mr. Lewis has always been unusually alert to nuance and ambiguity; he is wary of his sources and tests them against other evidence. In “Notes on a Century,” his lively new memoir, he writes that his work in archives instilled in him “a profound mistrust of written documents.”
via Book Review: Notes on a Century – WSJ.com.
