What's not to like about The New Yorker's Joan Acocella? First, the very name sings. Second, the lady knows dance: her ballet reviews and criticisms are splendid. Third, her book reviews are sharp, even provocative. I called attention some months back to her review of a new translation of Dante's Paradiso. Now she's considering an earthly paradiso: David Levering Lewis's God's Crucible:Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215.In Mr. Lewis's view, the Muslims' civilizing habits easily trump the brutish Franks. Ms Acocella gives Lewis his say in a quite extended review (James Wood, take note!), but then opines:

If, as Edward Said wrote, the old history books were covertly ideological, the current ones tend to be overtly ideological, as each new generation of scholars rides in to rescue supposedly worthy peoples who were wronged by earlier scholarship and, in their time, by axe-wielding conquerors. But all these peoples, or all the ones in Lewiss book, were conquerors. If the Christians took Spain from the Muslims, the Muslims had taken it from the Visigoths, who had appropriated it from the Romans, who had seized it from the Carthaginians, who had thrown out the Phoenicians. Lewis does not pretend that the Muslims were not conquerors; he simply justifies their conquest on the ground of their belief in convivencia, a pressing matter today. I can foresee a time when another matter important to us, the threat of ecological catastrophe, will prompt a historian to write a book in praise of the early Europeans whom Lewis finds so inferior to the Muslims. The Franks lived in uncleared forests, while the Muslims built fine cities, with palaces and aqueducts? All the better for the earth. The Franks were fond of incest? Endogamy keeps societies small, prevents the growth of rapacious nation-states. The same goes for the Franks largely barter economy. Trade such as the Muslims practicedfar-flung and transacted with moneyleads to consolidation. Thats how we got global corporations.Each new problem in our history engenders a revision of past history. Many of todays historians acknowledge this, and argue that their books, if politicized, are simply more honest about that than the politicized books of the past. This pessimism about the possibility of finding a stable truth may be realistic, but it seems to sanction, even encourage, special pleadingof which Gods Crucible, for all its virtues, is an example.

I haven't read the book, and would be interested in the reactions of any who have. What about "politicization," "ideology," and "special pleading?" Are they endemic to historical writing -- with invocation of "truth" only a pious veil or an asymptotic mirage (whew!)? Any advocates for "endogamy is beautiful?"