Armstrong 14-18

What a vast portion of history she covered in these 135 pages. I was amazed exactly how fast we came upon the modern part of this history. She was talking about Jihad, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Ottoman take over, and all of a sudden, 3 chapters later, she mentioned Binyamen Herzel and zionism in the late 1800s and we were in modern history. Dr. Horowitz said Wednesday, you all will be surprised how fast you are in modernity; that was right.

This was very valuable book for me to read. Obviously Armstrong said the repetitive things, left out details (she had to!), jumped from one issue to the next in two sentences, however she did cover roughly 4000 years of history in 430 pages. I enjoyed the book, I guess the right thing to do is consider it as ONE single source in a world of a million points of view. But in-exhaustive as it may be, I can say that I learned much from reading this book. I had many many gaps, per se, in my knowledge of this city and about Israel/Palestine in general. Armstrong's book filled them in! I can now recite the difference between the "Six Day War" and the "Yawm Kibbur War," and their approximate dates. I had previously heard these histories from different people including a Jewish friend of mine from Havard and a Maronite Lebanese Professor friend from NYU. As you can imagine, their perspectives were different as were their recount of the happenings of these wars. Not to say that Armstrong was unbiased regarding those two wars, its just her perspective of them is jaded differently from my two colleagues.

I found mostly in reading this book, I did indeed google search several different concepts. For example, when there was a topic mentioned in the book, of which I had not heard, I searched it which taught me more than just the words that Armstrong put on the page.

This was a worthwhile book!