ISLAND AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: The Forgotten History of Easter Island, new data and modern analysis change the game

ISLAND AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: The Forgotten History of Easter Island
MIKE PITTS
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A vital and timely work of historical adventure and reclamation by British archaeological scholar Mike Pitts—a book that rewrites the popular yet flawed history of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and uses newly unearthed findings and documents to challenge the long-standing historical assumptions about the manmade ecological disaster that caused the island’s collapse.

Rapa Nui, known to Western cultures as Easter Island for centuries, has long been a source of mystery. While the massive stone statues that populate the island’s landscape have loomed in the popular Western imagination since Europeans first set foot there in 1722, in recent years, the island has gained infamy as a cautionary tale of eco-destruction. The island’s history as it’s been written tells of Polynesians who carelessly farmed, plundered their natural resources, and battled each other, dooming their delicate ecosystem and becoming a warning to us all about the frailty of our natural world.

For too long, people have imposed their own theories on this extraordinary place and its inhabitants. Thor Heyerdahl, after his famous Kon-Tiki expedition, claimed the island had been discovered by light-skinned people from South America, believing only they could have been capable of travelling there and building the statues. Erich von Däniken took it to greater extremes, saying the statues had been carved by aliens. More recently, Jared Diamond's theory of ecocide—that Islanders destroyed their world by cutting down all the trees—has become popular as a vital message about the need to conserve our planet's resources.

But what if that history is wrong?

In The Island at the Edge of the World, archaeological writer and scholar Mike Pitts offers a direct challenge to the orthodoxy of Rapa Nui, bringing to light new research and documents that tell a dramatic and surprising story about what really led to the island’s downfall. Relying on the latest archaeological findings, he paints a vastly different portrait of what life was like on the island before the first Europeans arrived, investigating why a Polynesian people who succeeded for centuries throughout the South Pacific supposedly failed to thrive in Rapa Nui. Pitts also unearths the vital story of one of the first anthropologists to study Rapa Nui, an Oxford-trained iconoclast named Katherine Routledge, who was instrumental in collecting firsthand accounts from the Polynesians living on Rapa Nui in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But though Routledge’s impressive scholarship captured the oral traditions of what life had been like pre-1722, her work was widely dismissed because of her gender, her reliance on indigenous perspectives, and her conclusions which contradicted her historical peers.

A stunning work of revisionism, this book raises critical questions about who gets to write history and the stakes of ignoring that history’s true authors. Provocative and illuminating, The Island at the Edge of the World will change the way people think about Easter Island, its colonial legacy, and where the blame for its devastation truly lies.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: An archaeologist with access to twenty-first century morals and mores and technology is not going to write with kindness towards the previous generations' conclusions. They're rooted in outdated assumptions, using techniques that feel shockingly cursory to modern sensibilities; most shocking is the unquestioning racism of so very much of the analysis made by earlier generations.

A third, the first third, of the book relays those earlier analyses with what felt to me as condign levels of condemnation or disagreement, couched in evocative language. If you're offering a different light on past data with newer data and previously unavailable technology, casting shade is inevitable. Why not begin with tendentious tones? Many cavil at this. I do not.

After bringing attention to, in the second third, an underknown and too-little celebrated Katherine Routledge and her astute observations and contextualizations of the society and culture of the island, Pitts goes into the modern archaeology and emerging understanding of Rapa Nui. It's a paradigm shift, and we're seeing it in its earliest days.

I found the book as a whole fascinating, creating a gestalt of scholarly opinion's mechanisms of change as evidence...and society's changing mores...demand. It is not a simple bowing to the winds of fashion as the reactionaries and recidivists with political axes to grind insist. It is the scientific method at work, correcting its data to account for developments across all fronts of scholarship. No "Truth" is immutable, scary as many people find that fact. Fixing thoughts into cages of ideology is never permanent. Examining data, analyzing orthodoxy's tenets, is how Einstein blew open the ideas of physics...out came cell phones, computers, the entire internet.

I won't pretend I was completely fascinated during the whole read. It was a slog to read the archaeology jargon but it yielded a really fascinating new understanding of a place most of us are intrigued by. More than that, though, this is a perfect example of how science works: take a data set, examine it, add to it, and analyze both the before and after data sets. Present conclusions as "this new data refutes/supports previous data; the current, amended data set supports/refutes the following conclusions."

It's a message I like, I support, and I choose to amplify.

FOLLOWING CAESAR: From Rome to Constantinople, the Pathways That Planted the Seeds of Empire, armchair travel with the best kind of guide

FOLLOWING CAESAR: From Rome to Constantinople, the Pathways That Planted the Seeds of Empire
JOHN KEAHEY
St. Martin's Press
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A travel narrative following three ancient roads and looking at more than two thousand years of history of Ancient Rome through the modern eye.

In 66 B.C., young, ambitious Julius Caesar, seeking recognition and authority, became the curator of the Via Appia. He borrowed significant sums to restore the ancient highway. It was a way to curry favor from Roman citizens in villages along the route, built from Rome to Brindisi between 312-191 B.C. He succeeded and rapidly grew in popularity. After achieving greatness in Rome and the far reaches of Gaul, he led armies along this road to battle enemies in Roman civil wars. And then, across the Adriatic Sea, he joined Via Appia's sister road, the Via Egnatia that began in today's Albania. Other armies followed these two roads that eventually connected Rome to Byzantium, today's Istanbul. Octavian, who became, in 27 B.C., Rome's first emperor, and his friend and later enemy Mark Antony traveled portions of both roads to defeat Caesar's murderers Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in eastern Macedonia. The great Roman statesman Cicero, the Roman poet Homer, the historian Virgil and many other notables traveled along one or both of these roads. In the first century of the Roman Empire in the earliest years of Christianity, the apostles Peter and Paul traversed portions of them. Pilgrims, seeking salvation in far-away Jerusalem, followed them as well throughout much of the Middle Ages. In the early second century A.D., the emperor Trajan charted a new coastal route between Benevento and Brindisi, later called the Via Traiana.

Today, short stretches of the original three roads can be seen in the ruins of ancient Roman cities, now preserved as archaeological wonders, and through the countryside near, and sometimes under, modern highways. Following those routes is the purpose of treading along the path that Caesar and so many others took over the early centuries. Modern eyes, seeing through the mists of more than two thousand years of history, lead the traveler along these three roads coursing through six countries between Rome and Istanbul. It is a journey full of adventure, discovery, and friendship―one one worth taking.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I enjoy history for itself, and the many present-day echoes of historical events just add texture to my pleasure. This historical-tourism book was as deeply involving to me as a standard historical narrative because the conceit...following the Roman roads...is my idea of a great adventure vacation. The author was my guide on this escape from home. It worked as well as anything could because I knew I was in experienced hands (he has written four other books on touring Italy as a history buff.)

While I was very interested in his veteran-journalist's observations of the world traversed by the Roman roads he then traversed himself, and by his reports of his companions' responses to the modern world as well as the archaeology of the paths they traveled together, I was very disappointed that the book contained NO maps or photos.

Don't let that lapse stop you from enjoying the informed, intelligent voice of this forty-five-year veteran reporter as he shares his observations of the world he's moving through. His lifelong fascination with Italy and Rome (men really *are* obsessed with Rome!) gives him a very full view of the countries and regions he takes us through. This book is one of those rare books that, just as a reading experience, solely for the way the author builds an image and creates a simile, is a pleasure to read.

That his trip in Turkey, Asia Minor that was, coincided with COVID and its joys was very evocative for him. Plenty of plagues to meditate on. His religious ruminations are interesting to my deeply, faithfully atheist self...the road network of ancient Rome, and its internal postal connections enabled thereby, are largely responsible for the spread of the religion all across the empire. (There were christians in Pompeii...they found a ROTAS square there! By 79AD there were christians in Italy!)

I do want to mention that the "Caesar" of the title is not Julius; remember that Caesar was a title during the empire, and Trajan, whose Via Traiana is followed, was also a Caesar.

Self-gifting for a lovely time on #Booksgiving, as you settle down in your favorite reading spot, a beverage and a snack close at hand...Italy is involved, there is going to be food talk...and immerse yourself in a part of the world that could not possibly be richer in cultural highlights.

One star off for the absence of photos and/or illustrations.

THE BOOK OF ERRORS will delight and enlighten some, bewilder and befuddle others

THE BOOK OF ERRORS
ANNIE COGGAN (art) and MARK HAGE (text)
A Public Space Books
$18.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A collection of three illustrated essays looking at the preservation of three historic houses—and the layered, messy process of reconstructing our past and reimagining history. An architect and artist, Annie Coggan delves into the history of three iconic American structures—the Henry Knox Memorial in Maine; Fraunces Tavern in New York City; and the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia—and the stories of the people and ideas involved in their preservation to consider the ways in which history is reshaped by future generations.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A literary magazine of some significance gave birth to a publishing company of some significance. I've reviewed So Much for That Winter, one of their earlier book publications of a translation from the Danish via Graywolf Press, on this blog. I've also reviewed their initial own-imprint publishing venture, the late and underknown Bette Howland's delight of a short-fiction collection, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, on this blog. As both of those were positive reviews, I think you could safely say I am in tune with this press's aesthetic.

Here you see the artwork that forms the spine of this book's conceit. It is a series of beautiful paper models, and drawings, and painted drawings, of three different historic homes that are going to be conserved, restored, or rebuilt. The specific examples I've used are those provided by the publisher; all are from the Henry Knox Memorial, a house named "Montpelier," in Thomaston, Maine. The facts about the house are: It is a nineteen-room recreation, finished in 1929, of the original space built in 1794; that space was demolished in 1871 to make way for the Thomaston Railroad. The essay about this house is in the form of letters to and from the architect of the reconstruction, William E. Putnam, to one of the commissioning parties, Miss Watts of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Are these "real," by which I mean were they written by the parties whose names are on them, and selected by Author Coggan; or are they fabrications of Author Coggan's, made to elucidate a point about the eternal and delicate process of reaching a working understanding between client and architect?

I don't think it matters.

I don't see how anything but the effect, the gentle and eloquent interplay of images such as the above, with the words such as:

The evidence, even of eyewitnesses, as to the probable plans of the Knox House are so at variance that we have to consider it carefully and test each bit by things that we are sure of from a practical standpoint...

I wish you would read carefully Miss Miller's description and check it up with your remembrance. Also, if she is still living, I should think that a talk between you and her might clear up many of the points about which a difference of opinion seems to exist....

really makes a difference to the way one experiences this beautiful and thoroughly satisfying melding of idea, image, and purpose. We are brought into a quotidian conversation between patron and architect, between a man and a woman both of senior years, and thus in conjunction with the beautiful art, we are flies on the walls of these moments when History, long dead even then, was being negotiated for presentation to The Future. It is always a worthwhile endeavor to learn about what goes into the making of the world thee and me see.

Author Coggan's beautiful paper-and-paint constructions offer something I think too many books about preservation, architectural history, and art in general lack: A what-if, a road-not-taken approach to visual arts that I resonated with. It could simply be that I am so enchanted by the art itself that I am happy to see it used in this unusual manner. I grant that others might not feel this is anything other than a very niche project, showing a blow-by-blow of things that didn't happen, or might have happened, instead of cold non-fiction.

I see value in the exploration this approach allows of the why, the deeper why, of art and architecture pressed onto the service of History and the Monomyth of American History. The exceptionally contentious "restoration" of Fraunces Tavern, more precisely called a "conjectural reconstruction" (thanks, Wikipedia!), is illustrated in black-and-white drawings which, quite lovely though they are, suit the more angry and contentious responses to the Sons of the Revolution's major, and not uncontroversial, reimagining of the Tavern as of the 1790s (from the distance of 1904!):

"On passing the Washington statue...I thought I heard a loud sobbing... I said, 'Why weepest thou?' He said, 'Hast been to Fraunces's Tavern lately and witnessed the scoundrelly piece of vandalism that they have perpetrated upon that hallowed building, with whose walls I embraced my loved comrades?'"
—Letter to the New York Times (1906)

Daniel Libeskind, he of the master-planned Freedom Tower complex on the site of the old World Trade Center Twin Towers, would've recognized the entire imbroglio as being New York City doing what she does best: Eating her young. Nothing can ever be accomplished in the City without a decade of brangling, infighting, and public bitching.

The last of the three historic structures whose futures were assured by these early preservation attempts was famed upholsterer and flag-designer, Betsy Ross, whose residence in Philadelphia came in for a "re-configuration" to make it more suitable a setting for the probably apocryphal transfer of a flag designed by Mrs. Ross in her role as a famed upholsterer in Philadelphia society to General Washington. Since the probability is that Mrs. Ross didn't ever live in that tourist mecca, there's really no point getting exercised about it...and Author Coggan uses beautifully simple line drawings to evoke the scale of the house (it's dinky!) and the simplicity of its furnishings (spartan).

I think this lovely object belongs on the coffee tables of those whose appreciation for art is not limited to visual expressions of design, but also reaches for the "why" of art...what about this is necessary, what in this artistic expression am I going to think about and become acquainted with that I haven't, wouldn't, or couldn't otherwise?

This book is meant to close those gaps for you, elegantly, about parts of History that more often than not are so dead to us that we couldn't care less if they were there at all. I salute your vision, A Public Space Books, and your talent, Author Coggan!