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41 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Turkophilia Dementia, April 21, 2006
This review is from: Crescent and Cross: The Battle of Lepanto 1571 (Paperback)
I give this book two stars because the parts about ships and weapons are passable. But the author's understanding of the nature of the conflict between Christianity and Islam approaches dementia. His Turkophilia exceeds all sane bounds.
According to Bicheno, the harem was actually "a welfare system for deserving young ladies," and the Ottoman custom of using the harem to produce large number of royal siblings, then murdering all but one, a highly superior method of arranging the succession. He claims that the Turkish custom ("dervisma") of systematic kidnapping Christian children from villages so that they could be converted and enslaved, far from being barbaric, was actually so beneficial to the Christians that those who lived in cities actually sent their children out to the villages so they could have an equal opportunity to be snatched. (I am NOT making this up.) He describes the Ottoman society as being "highly dynamic."
These ravings don't just occur here and there, but are a drumbeat, which only let up when he launches into diatribes against Western civilization in general and Catholicism in particular. In short, the book is mostly politically correct nonsense, taken to extremes.
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32 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Snooze Fest, January 5, 2006
This review is from: Crescent and Cross: The Battle of Lepanto 1571 (Paperback)
Mr. Bicheno seems rather impressed with his collection of facts and tidbits which he manages to jumble together in the most incoherent fashion.
I did not expect this work to be a running screed against Catholicism and Western Civilization in general. As an Ottoman apologist supreme, Mr. Bicheno continuously points out the shortcomings of Christendom, while ignoring the entire point of the necessity for this great Battle - Islamic Jihad!
Is it really too much to ask what the Ottomans/Muslims were doing penetrating into Greece and Europe in the first place? For a much better discussion of this topic, please see "The Legacy of Jihad" by Andrew Bostom.
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25 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Lepanto 101, September 23, 2003
As a historian currently writing on Lepanto, I read with interest Bicheno's treatment, which seeks to introduce a popular audience to one of the more interesting east-west struggles. The previous reviewer--ciao, Venezia!--is correct in pointing out that history is most reliably told by specialist academics who immerse themselves in dry detail and clearly our Venetian reviewer friend takes legitimate issue with the less-than-scholarly course Bicheno charts. However, there is another role of the historian, it seems to me, that Bicheno performs quite well: that of storyteller. Bicheno, unlike Agnus Konstam (whom our Venetian friend cites as well) has read a wide range of Lepanto secondary literature (and unlike Konstam, he seems per his bibliography to have read widely in other languages, where most of worth is to be found on the subject). Bicheno admirably concerns himself with more than the mere Oct 7strategic decisions and military aspects of the battle--he cautiously dips his toe into the artistic and cultural aspects of the battle. Bicheno's bibliography reflects, if not a specialist historian's focus or insight, an admirable synthesis of the broader implications of Lepanto that Bicheno might not understand as well as he does the military play-by-play but nonetheless fearlessly addresses. (ie the labryntine Counter-Reformation religious context; lepanto's impact on art--Vasari, Veronese, Titian, just to name a few of the guys with brushes...) For the military enthusiast, Angus Konstam's book, with its computer reconstructions and illustrations, is a quick and visually-compelling introduction to the battle scene. Bicheno tries to take the topic a bit further than Konstam, with some success and some limitations. Both authors are, it is worth noting, responding to the new efflorescence of interest in East-West struggles, filling the vaccuum of Lepanto in Anglophonic hands--Lepanto has not been of much interest to Anglophonic historians except for King James who wrote a poem about it in the 1580s (Bicheno gets it wrong that the poem is lost. It was published in 1603 and was used politically to tout the King's talents with the pen... ) Lord Chesterton of course waxed rhapsodic on the battle, using it for his own Catholic agenda...and the dulcit Ian Fenlon, who is I believe a musicologist at Cambridge or Oxford, made dents in my seat at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice before my time and had a thing for motets involving Turks, artistic celebration and the sublime harmonics of Palestrina...) Anyway, Bicheno's is not a historian's history, but as a well-turned overview, I think its a good and timely introduction.
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