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Worlds At War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East And West (2008)

by Anthony Pagden(Favorite Author)

3.69 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1400060672 (ISBN13: 9781400060672)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Random House

review 1: Taking a central theme such as East vs. West and tracing it through history is a tall order, and most writers tend to resort to oversimplification to make everything "fit." Pagden avoids this trap, which makes this book much more substantive, if at times less satisfying.Though many of the events depicted in this book were familiar to me, connecting them through the paradigm of East and West provided new insight.Ultimately, this book filled in several missing pieces in my understanding of history I didn't know were there, gave me a richer understanding of what defines Western civilization, and gave me some new insight into the historical roots of the current situation in the Middle East; all while remaining mostly entertaining.
review 2: I really enjoyed the fir... morest few sample chapters...He traces the East-West conflict all the way back to the Trojan war and brings the reader to al-Qaeda and their sworn ambition of "final destruction of the west." The Trojan war might be an ancient myth but it was taken seriously. The Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, visited the site of the Trojan war in 1462. He stood at the shore (where the Greeks had arrived with their thousand ships). It wasn't like baywatch and the Sultan made a politically charged statement expressing his happiness on successfully avenging the defeat of Troy. In 1918 the British and Italian troops entered Istanbul and made some remarks about taking back the "second Rome." The author suggests that that while treaties and political favors are exchanged we have this habit of returning to the destructive theme of east vs west. less

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