Volume 55, Number 6 · April 17, 2008
The Voice of the Stones
By Peter Brown
Mosaics as History: The Near East from Late Antiquity to Islam
by G.W. Bowersock
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 146 pp., $22.95
No one is better qualified to instill in his readers the sense of wide horizons and of unexpected continuities between cultures that are usually held to be irrevocably divided than Glen Bowersock. His recent book, Mosaics as History: The Near East from Late Antiquity to Islam, is an iridescent masterpiece. A vast weight of erudition, unflinchingly precise, is brought to bear on a few crucial (and hitherto unconsidered) problems to produce a book that has the sharpness and the shimmer of an industrial diamond. The clarity, economy, and charm of Bowersock's writing make us forget the iron discipline on which his scrutiny of the evidence is based and the devastating effect of his conclusions on all kinds of conventional wisdom. It is the work of an urbane iconoclast.
Review, 2937 words
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