Josh G.

Awful narration and terrible editing.

Revisado: 01-23-25

There is not a single non-English word or name that the narrator has yet pronounced correctly, The file skips, repeats, backtracks, flubs by the narrator are left in rather than being cut etc. just dreadful.

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Disappointing

Revisado: 04-28-20

The author sets out to bulldoze the perhaps overblown and overrated Ibn Khaldun, yet concerns himself almost exclusively with trifles. Rather than an intellectual biography of Ibn Khaldun, we see something more akin to an exercise of the author's intllectual vanity. A great chunk of the book is concerned with Ibn Khaldun's pre-modern and highly idiosyncratic ideas, from his ignorance of meteorological phenomena, to his almost provincial turtling into religious handwaving to dismiss sophists and philosophers.

In a field crammed with praise for the man, the author somehow overstresses the goofier aspects of Ibn Khaldun's thought. A small and derisive tone pervades throughout. Ironically, for so much commentary on bad translations by others, the author deploys his own idiosyncratic (wrong) translation of Quran 17:16, a translation that states that god /commands/ the wealthy and powerful of the cities he wishes to destroy to do evil, when in fact no other version could I find renders the passage this way. Instead, every translation is to the effect that the elite are commanded to do /good/, yet continue to transgress. A bit embarrassing, really.

Rather than a secondary treatment of the man, his works and his times, I feel like the book is more a hit job, not that Ibn Khaldun did not deserve a bit of a hit, but the result is dissapointing in that I feel I've learned very little—the worst sin a book can commit.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Poorly formulated, painfully ignorant, outdated.

Revisado: 02-23-20

After the first few chapters I had to read about Mr. Fagan to discover what his actual area of expertise is, as I was struck by how far from current or correct his ideas on almost anything really are.

From the very start we have embarrassing falsehoods and misrepresentations. Talk of marriage, powerful chiefs, or nuclear family units in the paleolithic! The repeated assertion (he really, really doesn't want you to forget this) that Homo Neanderthalensis not only did not mate with humans, but were incapable of producing fertile offspring with Homo Sapiens! Obviously, as any middle school student for the last 20 years could tell you, the opposite is true.

We get dismissals of soundly dated sites in N. America was prove humans habitation long before his chosen timeframe of "15,000 years ago, maybe slightly more." The primary site to mention being Meadowcroft rockshelter, dated securely to at least 16,000YBP, maybe even 19,000.

Where Mr. Fagan doesn't merely summarize the literature (seemingly secondary literature!) in another area of which he is not familiar, he goes out of his way to demonstrate downright Victorian attitudes and unquestioned assumptions. Warfare, contrary to the literature and evidence, is trans-historical to Mr. Fagan's antique viewpoint, colonial violence explained away as dryly (actually much more dryly!) than the description of Egyptian conquests. In fact he dedicates his final portion to a rumination on the clash of civilizations, and he indeed puts it in those terms.

A stupendous waste of time after so many better lectures. As a refreshing change of pace, I recommend Ancient Civilzations of North America with Edwin Barnhart, and Origins of Civilization with Scott MacEachern. Both cover much of the same material from different perspectives, explain the history and limitations of methods and paradigms dominant in their fields, and most of allx know what they are talking about.

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