Book Description
Sodom and Gomorrah—now in a superb translation by John Sturrock—takes up the theme of homosexual love, male and female, and dwells on how destructive sexual jealousy can be for those who suffer it. Proust's novel is also an unforgiving analysis of both the decadent high society of Paris and the rise of a philistine bourgeoisie that is on the way to supplanting it. Characters who had lesser roles in earlier volumes now reappear in a different light and take center stage, notably Albertine, with whom the narrator believes he is in love, and the insanely haughty Baron de Charlus.
Book Description
Like its predecessors, this wonderful new translation is certain to be hailed as a literary event, bringing us a more rich, comic, and lucid Proust than American readers have previously been able to enjoy.
In this fourth volume, Proust's novel takes up for the first time the theme of homosexual love and examines how destructive sexual jealousy can be for those who suffer it. Sodom and Gomorrah is also an unforgiving analysis of both the decadent high society of Paris and the rise of a philistine bourgeoisie that will inevitably supplant it.
Download Description
Sodom and Gomorrah opens a new phase of In Search of Lost Time. While waiting in the courtyard of the Duchesse de Guermantes to observe the pollination of her orchid, the narrator secretly observes a sexual encounter between two men, the Baron de Charlus and Jupien, that is played out "as though in obedience to the laws of an occult art." This begins a meditation on sexuality and desire, and is fueled, in turn, by the narrator's own erotic attachment to the beautiful Albertine. Samuel Beckett wrote of Proust's representation of sexuality: "Flower and plant have no conscious will. They are shameless, exposing their genitals. And so in a sense are Proust's men and women . . . shameless. There is no question of right and wrong."
Customer Reviews:
"The true persuasion of sexual jealousy": Harold Bloom.......2007-03-02
Volume IV of "In Search of Lost Time" begins in the afternoon of the day of Princess of Guermantes's party, the one that Marcel had looked forward for so long as his definitive entrance into the world of high society. That afternoon, by spying on them, Marcel discovers with his own eyes, for the first time, homosexuality, in the form of an encounter between the depraved Baron de Charlus and the tailor Jupien, Marcel's neighbor in the property of the Guermantes. Later that evening, Marcel attends the party, attended also by a cast of characters like very few in literature: Charlus himself, a Swann close to his death, and others. The Dreyfuss cause keeps winning adepts, among them the very Prince and Princess of Guermantes, as the injustice of the sentence is revealed. In the party, Marcel continues on his way to disappointment about noblesse: they are people just like everyone else, only with grand names and big egos, but not much more.
Days later, with his mother, Marcel returns to Balbec, where, alone in his room he finally feels all the weight and sorrow of his grandmother's death, which had happened a year and a half before or so. It is a profound passage about the perception of death, everyday indifference to it, and the memories left to us by our beloved's passing away. In Balbec, Marcel reencounters with Albertine, in that perverted play of seduction and deceit, of attraction and rejection, which foreshadows a sick relationship. Disturbed by the graphic discovery of homosexuality, Marcel broods a lot about it. Two women who stay at the same hotel, and who openly show their lesbianism, awaken in Marcel a deep suspicion about Albertine's mysterious life, and so begins a torment of permanent jealousy, of anxiety and anguish which reminds the reader of the similar episode, in times gone by, of the beginning of the relationship between Swann and Odette. Meanwhile, Marcel has simultaneous relationships with a couple of maids of the hotel (literally simultaneous).
Marcel rents a car to go around with Albertine through the countryside and the coast, deepening his relationship with the capricious, naughty, annoying and elusive Albertine. In her company, he begins to frequent the little band of the social-climbing Verdurins (where Swann had met Odette years before), in the country estate they have rented from the Marquises of Cambremer. The central part of the book narrates that summer in Balbec and its surroundings, above all the wide mosaic of characters surrounding the Verdurins: insecure but arrogant Doctor Cottard and his simple wife; musician Vinteuil; the rustic and silent sculptor Ski; Professor Saniette, pathetic and constantly humiliated; and Madame Verdurin herself, presumptuous and increasingly successful in society. Over this fresco is shown the repulsive couple of Charlus and musician Morel, son of a former servant of the Prousts. Morel is the worst kind of climber and representative of sexual and moral corruption. In contrast with what happens in the first three volumes, here it seems that it is the nobles who yearn to be accepted in bourgeois society, and not the other way around. It is the bourgeois who attract interesting people: intellectuals, scientists, artists. Charlus makes a fool of himself big time, pretending everybody ignores his homosexuality, when in fact he is the target of cruel jokes and gossip. So continues the great saga of memory, sex, love, longing, and social observation of the XX Century.
Like in no one of the previous volumes, in this one the subject of homosexuality is analyzed in all its complexity. Marcel and Albertine's relationship forebodes hell. Charlus begins to sink. The bourgeois approach triumph. Like in all the previous volumes, what astounds the reader is Proust's immense power of microscopic vision to analyze individuals and dissect societies. It includes a magical reflection on dreams, as well as precious depictions of landscapes, sexual assaults, personalities and emotions.
Wonderful.......2006-06-14
Sodom and Gomorrah makes it difficult for those who speak of Proust and attempt to reduce his grand work to mere flowery social observation. This is a bold and often disturbing installment of la recherché, as Marcel recalls brutal homosexual sadomasochism among two of the principle characters, and has to deal with great loss and self-loathing.
The narrator also returns us to the superficial world of the Verdurins, where Swann and Odette first made their interactions in Swann in Love.
Marcel falls deeply in love with Albertine, but later discovers that she has been involved in homosexual relationships with two women, mirroring Swann's problems with Odette. There are remarkable passages on the nature of love in here: "But if something brings about a violent change in the position of that soul in relation to us, shows us that it is love with others and not with us, then by beating of our shattered heart we feel that it is not a few feet away from us but within us that the beloved creature was. Within us, in regions more or less superficial" (pg. 720)
Sodom and Gomorrah is a deeply felt and complex development in Proust's extraordinarily full and beautiful search.
a splendid translation and my favorite volume thus far.......2005-06-11
I am writing here of the "Penguin Proust" translation by John Sturrock. (Much of what appears on this page is misleading, with the editorial matter referring to an audiobook and many reader reviews to an earlier translation. Even first-sentence quote is not from Sturrock's translation!)
Of the four Penguin Proust volumes I've read so far, this is my favorite--a wonderfully funny study of society (if not of sex). Proust specializes in transformations. We'll be introduced to a character and led to believe that we know everything of importance about him, only to have him turn up in a later volume as entirely different. In this volume, the remote and terrible Baron de Charlus is tranformed a pathetic tubby, besotted by the pianist Morel (himself a bit of a transformation, since he first appeared in the novel as the son of a valet).
Marcel (the narrator) meanwhile finds himself more deeply involved with Albertine, herself probably a stand-in for a male secretary of Proust's, Alfred Agostinelli. To complicate matters, I see elements of this relationship not only in the Marcel-Albertine affair, but also in the Charlus-Morel romance. It's as if Proust divided his experience into two parts, giving the romantic elements to Marcel and the comic part to Charlus.
The two romances come together at the seaside salon of the awful Madame Verdurin, who is inexorably rising in the world. In one of Proust's hundred-page setpieces, the aristocratic baron has his first clash with the social-climbing Verdurins. I found myself cheering for Charlus, whom I'd earlier learned to dislike, because he is so genuine and she is such a fraud. And I know in my heart (and through my earlier readings of this great novel) that things are not going to turn out well for Charlus. Against all logic, Proust in one of his hundred-page dissections of French society is able to keep me on tenterhooks.
The less said about Albertine, the better. I am not one of those who find her/him a convincing character. So it is with a bit of apprehension that I now turn to volume five of the Proust Penguin, containing the two books of the "Albertine cycle."
But back to Sodom (as it were): this is a wonderful translation of a riveting story. If you stick with "In Search of Lost Time" thus far, you will know that you are in the middle of one of the great experiences of your life.
Men are from Sodom, women are from Gomorrah.......2004-10-22
"Sodom and Gomorrah," the fourth volume of Proust's masterwork "In Search of Lost Time," contains two very long set pieces that strike me as amazing achievements in the entire canon of literature. The first is an evening party at the mansion of the Prince and Princess de Guermantes attended by Proust's young narrator despite his doubt about having been properly invited, and the second is a dinner at the seaside clifftop house of the Verdurins filled with absurd but fascinating conversation. These episodes combined cover hundreds of pages of narration yet never give the impression of being stretched because Proust evokes the natural importance in every detail and human gesture, as though the course of the world depended on every little thing that transpires.
These details unify under the banner of the entire novel into a series of fictionalized memories of Proust's social life as a young man making his way through Parisian aristocratic circles and observing the events which develop his artistic conscience. These memories tend to be romanticized visions of the past, wistful dreams of what he might have really wanted his life to be: "We dream much of paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost too."
The title of the volume implies love between men and women, and men and men, and women and women. Here, the young Marcel chronicles the torrid romances of the Baron de Charlus, brother of the Duke de Guermantes, whose salon was the focal arena of the previous volume. Upon his spying--innocently, not judgmentally--on de Charlus and Jupien the tailor in an act of sodomy, he expounds on the societal attitudes confronting male homosexuality and on the ways de Charlus must go about procuring younger men for himself, such as he does with a conceited young violinist named Morel.
Meanwhile, Marcel's love affair with Albertine, the pretty girl whom he met at the seaside resort of Balbec in Volume II, is progressing slowly but not smoothly. He notices that she, as Odette used to do with Charles Swann, is beginning to play games with his propensity for jealousy, flirting first with a girl named Andree and then with Marcel's friend, the soldier Saint-Loup. As the volume wraps up, Marcel resolves to marry her, hoping to draw her away from her Sapphic inclinations.
Proust portrays a wide range of colorful supporting characters, who I have no doubt are based on people he knew in real life. While staying at Balbec, Marcel meets an eccentric family named Cambremer whom the lift-boy at the hotel mistakenly but amusingly calls Camembert and whose acquaintance provides a springboard for the dinner at the Verdurin estate. Here we experience the personalities of the physician Cottard, whose preoccupation with his Verdurin invitations affects his professional ethics; the shy, socially graceless Saniette, who is continuously bullied by Verdurin; and a pedantic bore named Brichot, who talks almost exclusively about the etymology of place names.
The motifs recurring in this volume include the society-enveloping controversy over the Dreyfus affair, the snobbery involved in invitations to certain salons, and Marcel's association with the aging and ill Swann and his wife Odette, who now have some hard-earned esteem in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. In his deeply contemplative approach to narration, Proust functions as an essayist as much as he does a novelist, but his genius is that he merges both forms seamlessly. His sentences, at least as translated into English by Moncrieff and Kilmartin, are consistently worthy of applause and inspire me to write with more sensitivity to my surroundings.
The truth of love.......2004-02-22
The fourth volume of "In search of lost time" (Sodom and Gomorrah) begins with the sickness of Marcel's grandmother's sickness, which will lead her to the grave. During the dissease she will be treated by doctor Huxley, whose behavior surrounding the woman's unavoidable death awakens Marcel's digressions. Once she dies, the story resumes his contact with the high spheres of society. Marcel travels once again to Balbec, where he finds Albertine again. Their relationship grows as they assist to Mme. Verdurin's gatherings. Her "wednesdays", as she calls them, now that she attends in Balbec to her group of friends. Marcel's mind games surrounding Albertine are comparable to those utilized by Charlus to manipulate his young lover, the son of an old servant of his (Marcel's) grandfather... who plays the violin. Marcel is involved in this relationship as an comunicating vessel between Charlus and his "Adonis". It is rather curious how telephones, automobiles and trains are more and more involved in the telling of the events. The encounters in the stations, the dangers of traveling in an automobile, the unpersonalized feel to talking to someone through a telephone, etc... All these entail not only technological changes, but social ones as well: how people relate to one another begins to be considered outside the reduced space of fixed spheres... now, they move all over the space, they can even be broken into pieces... their voices, their bodies, the possibility of an effective transport that also allows privacy and secrecy (such as Marcel and Albertine's travels in the car, and all the implied events surrounding this machine -involving Charlus and his young "friend").
Marcel's doubts about Albertine's likes, are more overwhelming everyday... and he finally decides to marry Albertine, to take her to Paris with him.
In this volume, Marcel Proust submerges deeper in the waters of human affections and desires. If in the second volume he began to experience love for the first time, in this one, he is experiencing love outside the protection of young idelism and romanticism... instead, he realizes the conection between love, desire, snobism and pain: the truth of love is far from being an eternal, selfless and happy feeling: it is the constant haunting of a question, the everlasting wonder about evil within and without.
It is most memorable when Marcel assists to a party and describes the unfixed nature of gender differentiation: how much can a woman look like a man, how much can a woman desire another woman... and how much like a woman can one man desire another man.
Book Description
Unlock doors to the lost worlds of the Bible -- from the Garden of Eden to the ruins of Babylon
Did a volcano part the Red Sea? Have scientists found Eve? Was the pharaoh of the Oppression a woman? Did the Jordan River really cease flowing the day Jericho fell?
A brilliant author, scientist, and adventurer who has been called "the real Indiana Jones," Dr. Charles Pellegrino takes us on a remarkable journey from the Nile to the Tigris-Euphrates rivers -- crossing time, legend, and ancient lands to explore the unsolved mysteries of the Old Testament. Return to Sodom and Gomorrah is an epic saga of discovery that interweaves science, history, and suspense --the first book ever to bring archaeologists, scientists and theologians together to examine the same evidence. In this enthralling revelatory adventure, Pellegrino introduces us to dedicated pioneers like Benjamin Mazar, Leonard Woolley, and T. E. Lawrence, who retraced the steps of Moses to demystify the Exodus and the Flood. In the process, he enables us to view ancient relics in an extraordinary new light -- as both fascinating windows on the past and vivid signposts to the future.
Customer Reviews:
Brilliant, but also hilarious.......2007-09-18
Pellegrino, a palentologist who has engaged in archeology is absolutely brilliant in the way he gives explanations for Biblical episodes, sets timelines that corroborate with Egyptian and Chinese documented history, finds locations that he believes are more justified than those popularly ascribed and sends up the competing schools of archeology that never talk to each other.
His explanations are rooted in common sense. In Genesis there is talk of the giants who roamed the earth and married the daughters of man- Homo Neandrathalis fossils from Biblical times have been found in the Sinai. Eve was cursed with trouble in childbirth- knowledge brings a larger brain and that makes childbirth more difficult. The snake's curse of crawling on its belly explains why snakes have hipbones but no legs- early man must have noticed. Inborn aversions to snakes by all primates, aversions which can be unlearned but which are hardwired, probably happened in evolutionary time when ancestors to mankind were quite small and preyed upon by snakes, and were explained by the curse shortly after creation.
He believes, based upon fossil evidence that he was excavating when the first Gulf War broke out, that Sodom and Gomorrah were built over Iraqui oil fields where frequent earthquakes in the region allowed gas to escape and where fires from cooking braziers could have ignited it. Moses saw the fires some 300 years later, and probably only an oil field would burn that long, absent airplanes from Texaco to put them out One hopes that his archaeological site has survived the war in Iraq.
The Bible refers to the Philistines as "Sea people" during the story of Deborah and makes note of their technological superiority. Pellegrino believes that the Minoans, displaced by the Theran volcano were the Philistines. The Theran volcano can explain the plagues in Egypt- he gives ample evidence of red algae blooms after volcanic explosions, epidemics and even toad migrations (the word for frog and toad is the same in Hebrew.) There are Egyptian descriptions that match the Biblican ones- Egyptologists have dated them 35 years later, but that is based on pottery shards. And the Chinese, ever the compulsive record keepers, recorded the dimming of the sun at the same time- a moving phenomenon observed with Mt. St. Helens.
It took me longer to read this book than usual because I was dissolving into paroxysms of laughter every few pages and had to read the text to my husband. Pellegrino's send-up of archeologists and their internecine politics was especially funny, and illuminating to boot. Let's hope that Pellegrino is able to return to Sodom and Gomorrah to finish his archaeological excavations.
A good challenge to people's preconceptions.......2007-08-18
I read this book in the fall of 2005, which was a very rough and chaotic time in my life - serendipitously appropriate, I suppose, for a book about one of the most historically controversial, and war-torn regions, in human history.
The author (whom I've met in person) takes the reader on a gripping multi-disciplinary journey into the past, and present, of the Fertile Crescent (Middle East). It is both a physical, as well as a metaphysical, dig though many of the interweaving and overlapping layers of oral and written tradition, archeological reality, and widely-held misconceptions and institutionalized convenient half-truths ... with the ultimate goal being to gain a better appreciation of what really happened.
It was immensely interesting to see, for instance, real-life accounts of archeological digs involving some of the places, people, and events, mentioned in the Old Testament ... as well as to see how various early Judeo-Christian accounts of the day (both oral and written) were eventually culled together and codified/blessed (by the religious powers of the day) into what has since been passed down to us (in various different times and languages) as "The Bible".
Biblical literalists beware ...
[Wizard of Oz] "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain !" [/Wizard of Oz]
... because some of your dogmatic preconceptions and convenient assumptions will be sorely challenged by this book. Something you should look forward to, and to be grateful for, rather than be offended by - because the better we can grasp (as best we are able) the truth, the better we can grasp our place in the greater scheme of things, as well as our understanding of "God". Personally, if getting closer to Truth/God is not at the very heart of most religions, I don't know what is.
Highly recommended.
Historical perspective........2006-11-04
An excellent historical perspective of the scriptures.
Anyone who knows anything about the Bible knows the pitfalls of literal interpretation.
This was taught to me by Christian Brothers when I was in college.
Pellegrino is a multi-disciplined scientist and a very readable writer.
He insults nobody, but the ignorant.
Five Stars!
A breath of fresh air.......2006-07-03
Mr. Pellegrino does a great job using science and history to show how the myths of the bible may have had a kernel of truth at their core. I would highly recommend this to Christians and non-Christians alike.
Wideangle View of the Ancient World.......2006-06-26
Return to Sodom and Gomorrah, recounts the volcanic eruption at the major Minoan port on what is now known as Santorini. The shear power of the blast, the wide distribution of the ash cloud and the tsunamis that followed, were of "mythic proportions" and engendered myths. According to another of my favorite books, When They Severed Earth from Sky (E.W.&P. Barber), myths are the result of oral histories being compacted and altered in predictable ways over millennia. In trying to decode the events described in them, it is important to adopt the viewpoint of the participants. Noah's flood, for instance, need not have covered the world known to us. As Pellegrino points out, the disaster probably covered the Fertile Crescent, the world as known to the original witnesses.
There are accounts of the Thera eruption encoded in the Greek story of Atlantis and in Egyptian writings as well as in the Exodus story in the Bible. Unfortunately, there haven't been enough early Minoan writings uncovered to help in the deciphering of Linear A. It is hoped that as the extensive city on Santorini is excavated, more writings will be discovered. Linear B is related to early Greek, but they don't have a clue as yet what Linear A is related to.
What impressed me most was that the Minoans, protected by the sea and engaged in widespread trade on it, did not seem to have to fight to have influence in the ancient world. They prospered and developed a superior culture in peace. They had art that inspired the Greeks and plumbing rivaling our own. (They had flush toilets and showers with hot and cold running water.) Unlike their successors, they apparently did not relegate women to an inferior position. Pellegrino makes the connection with their veneration of the bull and the older
Catalhoyuk culture in nearby Turkey. Perhaps future excavations of the even older city, below that destroyed by the giant blast, will illuminate that possibility further.
After the volcano destroyed much of their territory and undermined their economy, the Mycenaeans, the Indo-European ancestors of the Greeks, took control. Minoans scattered and some became the "sea people" of the Bible, the Philistines.
Because they were the enemy of the protagonists in the Bible, the Philistines have had a bad press for many years. There are some excavations going on that paint a more realistic picture. That brings me to another point that struck me in the Pellegrino book. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed; therefore they must have been wicked. From the point of view of the witnesses, it had to be the wrath of God therefore they had to have sinned. Pellegrino suspects that natural gas deposits in that oil and gas rich region may have exploded causing the destruction as described in the Bible.
Average customer rating:
- Save your Cheetos
- Captivating, informative, transporting.
- CLEAR, OBJECTIVE, AND UNBIASED; a must for history lovers.
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Return to Sodom and Gomorrah: Bible Stories from Archaeologists
Charles Pellegrino
Manufacturer: Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0679400060
Release Date: 1994-09-27 |
Customer Reviews:
Save your Cheetos.......2001-05-04
In addition to very fascinating excursions to Mesopotamia, where the author sends a camera up in a kite to take photos of the scorched lines in the earth left over from what he suspects may by either Sodom or Gomorrah, and the profile of ancient Ninevah including a canal system inside the city walls, Pellegrino takes a moment to let us know that prior to the elimination of coconut oil as an ingredient, Twinkies would burn for 20 minutes, and were a great back up source of light for underground explorations. Now, he makes do with giant Cheetos, held with a tweezers, which will burn for maybe 10 minutes. I tried it, and it's true.
Captivating, informative, transporting........1997-02-04
With wit and humor Dr. Pellegrino and his companions today
led me on the most stirring and provacative tour of my life.
Places once disconnected in my mind's eye are now alive, and
full of fascination for me: the straight, steady Nile River
Valley and its sluggish culture; the now-you-see-them-now-you
-don't peoples of the fertile plains of Mesopotamia; and the
ancient ancestors, cousins over the centuries from Asia, Africa,
and Europe, woven together in the Middle East. The Gulf War,
its rising up and falling down, make sense to me now, historically
if not humanly, as does the conflict between Israel and Palestine,
and the cyclic nature of life. Thank you, Charles, for a most
interesting and illuminating day.
CLEAR, OBJECTIVE, AND UNBIASED; a must for history lovers........1997-01-06
Dr. Pellegrino welded my eyes, and mind, to his fascinating archaeological
journey thorough the Holy Land. I enjoyed reading a book where
the author doesn't use religious bias. His knowledge of the Bible
is extremely extensive, which combines with his archaeological expertise
to produce a book that gives the reader a better understanding, in clearer terms,
of the fascinating stories of the Bible. Read this book with an open mind,
and read it again once you are done with it. For those who are non-practicing Christians
(like me), this book is an excellent companion guide to the Holy Scriptures.
Once your mind is saturated in its informative content, you'll want to recomend it to the
rest of your friends and family, and just about anyone else you meet from that day on.
--Andrés Goyanes--
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The Destruction of Sodom, Gomorrah, and Jericho: Geological, Climatological, and Archaeological Background
David Neev , and
K. O. Emery
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0195090942 |
Book Description
The story of the destruction of Sodom, Gomorrah, and Jericho--three cities situated along a major fault line extending 1,100 kilometers from the Red Sea to Turkey--is the oldest such description in human history. In this book, noted geologists K.O. Emery and David Neev have revisited that story to shed light on what happened there some 4,350 years ago. With all the benefits of modern geological and forensic science techniques at their disposal, the authors explore an area where earthquakes, volcanic activity, variations in the Dead Sea's level, and oscillations between arid and wet climates have affected life there for over 10,000 years. In reviewing the geology, biblical paleogeography, and limnology of the region, the authors have produced fascinating insights into the tectonic and climatic changes that have occurred in the region over the last 6,000 years and how those changes have affected cultural life in the Middle East. The Destruction of Sodom, Gomorrah, and Jericho is the first book to combine modern science and biblical archaeology to produce an authoritative account of the of these three great cities. It will fascinate students and researchers in geology, geophysics, and archaeology alike.
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- Its American Perspective Limits Its Value
- U.S. Navy to the Dead Sea
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Sailors in the Holy Land: The 1848 American Expedition to the Dead Sea and the Search for Sodom and Gomorrah
Andrew C. A. Jampoler
Manufacturer: US Naval Institute Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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Adak: The Rescue of Alfa Foxtrot 586
ASIN: 1591144132 |
Book Description
Following the success of his first book about a U.S. Navy flight crew's desperate battle to survive a 1978 ditching in the icy north Pacific, Andrew Jampoler has turned to an equally exciting Navy adventure set in the desert of Ottoman Syria more than one hundred fifty years ago. Ordered to fix the exact elevation of the Dead Sea and to collect scientific specimens, the expedition was the Navy's first and last to the storied salt lake of the Old Testament. The expedition's leader, Lt. William Lynch, was at once a coolly scientific and a devoutly religious man who hoped to find the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah and sustain the Book of Genesis account of the cities' destruction. Drawing on his extensive research in Turkey, Jordan, and Israel, the author presents not only first-time details of the expedition but also sets the expedition into a colorful context of biblical story and of the great events of the mid-nineteenth century that included global epidemic disease, political revolution in Europe, the collapse of Ottoman imperial rule, and the secularization of America. He also offers a taste of Navy life at sea during a decade when sail began to give way to steam.
Readers join Lynch and his men as they launch two small boats on the Sea of Galilee at Tiberias to run the Jordan rapids and then plumb the depths of the Dead Sea while members of the shore party and their Arab escorts follow along on camels and horseback. Officers and sailors alike believed that every previous expedition had been stricken by killing disease or assaulted by murderous desert tribes, but specially selected volunteers were prepared to suffer on a mission as much about religion as science. A sea story of unusual dimensions, their adventure has secured a permanent place in history thanks to Jampoler's skillful recounting of events large and small.
Customer Reviews:
Its American Perspective Limits Its Value.......2006-08-05
The multi-month expedition undertaken by the U.S. Navy to the Holy Land and led by Lt. William F. Lynch in 1848 rates as one of the most exotic the service has ever undertaken, as written by Daniel Pipes. At a time when the navy consisted of only eleven thousand officers and men and in general stayed on well-worn routes, setting off to the Dead Sea, not for any military purpose but in search of Sodom and Gomorrah, ranks as a folly. But the mission had serious scientific purposes, was professionally executed, and provides to this day important information on the Jordan River and its associated lakes. (This author cited Lynch's report at length in a 1988 article.)
Jampoler clearly took great pleasure in writing this very detailed account of the Lynch expedition, gamboling after topics that are not, strictly speaking, essential to his text (such as the marital infidelities of Lynch's wife while he was at sea or the connection between the city of Sodom and the jailing of Oscar Wilde). He satisfyingly tracks down references, provides historical context, and gives those details necessary to make the nearly yearlong trip come alive. But the author's focus is almost exclusively American, so that the Middle East of the time feels more like a colorful and unchanging backdrop than an alive and dynamic foreground. Any reader who would approach Sailors in the Holy Land from the point of view of learning about Palestine a century and a half back will be disappointed; for such readers, there is no replacing the accounts of the participants, including Lynch's two books and those of other participants, John S. Jenkins and Edward Montague.
U.S. Navy to the Dead Sea.......2005-07-27
On 31 July 1847, four months after the capture of the port of Veracruz during the Mexican war, an expedition proposed by Lt. William Lynch to circumnavigate the Dead Sea was approved by the Navy. The specific goal of the expedition was to establish the elevation of the Dead Sea. He also intended to collect mineral and other specimens. What he really wanted to do was to find the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Traven in these days was not nearly as easy as it is now. Lynch had a 'metallic' boat which he proposed to travel. But the horses that were to pull the boat were broken to the saddle, not harness. That was just the beginning.
This book tells the story of this expedition, but more than that puts it into place as a story of the time as well. This is a little known episode in the history of the U.S. Navy.
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Sodom and Gomorrah : On the Everyday Reality and Persecution of Homosexuals in the Middle Ages
Bernd-Ulrich Hergemoller
Manufacturer: Free Association Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1853435031 |
Book Description
Sodom and Gomorrah provides a meticulously researched account of the lives, suffering, and everyday reality of homosexual men in Europe, between AD 500 and AD 1500. The author begins by tracing the development of relevant criminal law from the Romans to the beginnings of modern Europe, and goes on to explore the differences and similarities in approaches towards homosexuality in present and past cultures. Pertinent legal cases in Germany and Italy are reviewed, and the first English language translation of 15th century documents relating to same-sex trials in Cologne provide valuable insight into prevailing attitudes. Following a discussion of the anti-sodomite discourse of theology of the period, there is further exploration, not just of the negative, persecutory aspects of same-sex existence in those times, but also of the many positive elements of it in everyday life.
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