Resultados de "Peter Kriger" en Todas las categorias

For three centuries, the people of the North were the primary security problem of Christian Europe. Today their descendants award the Peace Prize, mediate other nations’ wars, and appear at the top of every index of trust and decency anyone has thought to construct.

Everyone knows how the Middle Ages ended. Gunpowder arrived, the armored horseman became a museum piece, castles fell, feudalism collapsed, and the modern world walked in through the breach. It is a wonderful story. Almost none of it survives contact with the evidence. The finest plate armor ever made was produced after firearms were common, and the best armorers advertised their work by shooting it and leaving the dent. Heavy cavalry went on deciding battles for three hundred years after the first cannon appeared on a European field.

Around the year 1200 BC, the most connected world that had ever existed came apart. From the palaces of Mycenae to the harbors of the Levant, from the Hittite capital in the Anatolian highlands to the grain barges of the Nile, a web of kingdoms had spent three centuries learning to depend on one another for tin and copper, grain and gold, marriage alliances and mutual defense. Within two generations, most of it was gone. Cities burned, scripts were forgotten, and the survivors remembered the age they had lost as a vanished dream of heroes.

A barbarian king sacked Rome in the year 410, and fifteen hundred years later teenagers are still being blamed for it. They do not know this. Neither, for that matter, did the cathedral builders, the horror novelists, or the engineers now training machines in dim rooms. They are all, every one of them, characters in the same long misunderstanding, and the misunderstanding has a name. The name is Goth. This is the biography of a single word that should never have travelled as far as it did.

No hominid was ever built to rule an empire. The equipment we carry for reading a face, keeping a promise, fearing the disapproval of the people around us, and feeling another person's pain was forged for groups small enough that everyone knew everyone. Take that ancient apparatus, seat it above millions, and cut away every correction the group once supplied, and the mind does not rise to the occasion. It deforms — and it deforms in the same direction every time.

For five centuries we have told ourselves a flattering story: that the peoples who lived along the Great Lakes and across the Canadian Shield were simple, and that the newcomers who arrived by ship were advanced. This book takes that story apart, gently and completely. Every society that has ever lasted had to solve the same short list of problems. It had to feed its people, keep them warm, bring them clean water, move them across distance, remember its laws, defend its homes, settle its quarrels, and teach its children who they were.

Some films refuse you everything. They withhold explanation. They dwell on rain and rust and silent faces. They impose a length that feels, for the first twenty minutes, like an insult. And then they move into you and stay for the rest of your life. Meanwhile the film that gave you everything is forgotten by the time you reach the parking lot. This book begins with that puzzle, and it does not stay with cinema for long.