A passionate history of a world unfolding across many continents and five centuries by one of our greatest and internationally bestselling historians.
Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University. His award-winning books, translated into fifteen languages, include Citizens, Landscape and Memory, Rembrandt's Eyes, A History of Britain, The Power of Art, Rough Crossings, The American Future, The Face of Britain and The Story of the Jews- Finding the Words (1000 BCE - 1492). His art columns for the New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for criticism and his journalism has appeared regularly in the Guardian and the Financial Times where he is Contributing Editor. He has written and presented more than fifty films for the BBC on subjects as diverse as Tolstoy, American politics, and The Story of the Jews and is co-presenter of a new landmark series on the history of world art, Civilisations.
A magnificent achievement… [a] parade of bustlingly vital
characters from across the globe ... all painted in luminous
colour… By offering such a throbbing cavalcade of characters,
Schama is defying several key assumptions, even stereotypes, about
Jewish history and Jews themselves… Above all, while much Jewish
history can read like a sorrowful trudge through disaster, plague
and pogrom, Schama’s book teems with life rather than death
*Guardian*
Magisterial ... the product of a world-class historian at the peak
of his creative powers … rich, ornate, intensely evocative and
sensory. With astonishing range and extraordinary synthesising
powers, Schama captures the drama of Jewish history.
*Financial Times*
A rich melody that soars above the ground bass of prejudice and
persecution … Schama has made himself the leading virtuoso of our
time. This second volume of this trilogy is an affirmation of faith
in the grand narrative … Its familiar and familial tone proclaims
the author’s unapologetic mission to play his part in the story of
the Jews by bringing their history alive… [A] glittering gemstone
of a book
*The Times*
So beautifully written it regularly takes your breath away, it is a
book far greater than the sum of its parts. Daunted by its colossal
size, I started reading with some trepidation; I finished filled
with wonder and delight.
*Times Literary Supplement*
An extraordinary cultural journey, filled with astonishingly
colourful and outrageous characters … Schama delivers a superb and
thrilling ride, both inspirational and tragic.
*Mail on Sunday*
Magisterial… a wonderfully rich narrative … The third and final
volume won’t be easy reading. But at least in the company of Schama
– one of the finest writers and thinkers of his generation – we’re
guaranteed a guide both insightful and eloquent
*Daily Telegraph*
Rich, complex and fascinating … Schama maintains the attention with
the vividness of his writing and his talent for unearthing gripping
figures full of human contradictions. And through this dazzling
immersion in the preoccupations of the period that the bigger
picture slowly emerges … Profoundly illuminating
*Observer*
Simon Schama is an international treasure ... By painterly touches,
he manages to convey colour, texture, shape, context, light and
shadow, as well as to stimulate the senses ... He is imaginative,
epigrammatic and fearless ... an effervescent cicerone who
instructs and entertains in like measure.
*Spectator*
Immensely erudite and compulsively readable … The importance of
Schama’s book is that it forces the reader to think about how the
long and shameful legacy of Christian hatred for Jews is reworked
in “enlightened” society… Deeply engaging
*New Statesman*
Schama is a talented storyteller with a dramatist’s eye for
character … Schama leavens his tale with wit and charm, while also
displaying remarkable breadth of research and erudition, ranging
fluently from Sephardic merchant princes in the Mediterranean to
fevered kabbalistic sects in Galilee
*Sunday Times*
The second volume of Simon Schama’s story of the Jews…continues
with a cast of characters so extraordinary that some seem hardly
more believable than the Sabbath-keeping Sambatyon river… Schama,
as both a historian and a Jew, closes his wonderful book the only
way he could: with love shot through with melancholy and
foreboding
*The Economist*
Schama writes history through personalities, a technique that makes
the second of his vast-ranging history of his people as gripping as
the first… All these stories offer pathways backwards and forwards
in time, and make an unforgettable tale of mixed fortunes
*The Times*
A masterpiece
*New Statesman*
A revelation. It is an engaging and electrifying read by a skilled
literary craftsman, cultural historian and tour guide … Schama
enchants his readers by introducing colorful characters worthy of a
Charles Dickens novel ... [it] dazzles with the art and alchemy of
an adventure novel
*Washington Post Sunday*
Schama writes with power and energy, and his patchwork of
individual tales crosses the world.
*The Observer*
Extraordinary… From Britain to France, from America to the dark
forests of central and eastern Europe, Schama’s scalpel-like wit
and painterly descriptions provide a bravura panorama of the Jewish
story
*Jewish Chronicle*
It’s a riveting read, bursting with anecdote, colour and wit.
Schama uses individual stories to highlight horror and suffering,
but also to illustrate bravery, achievement and hope
*History Today*
Few historians write with the energy of Simon Schama. His second
volume on the history of the Jews shows that Schama has lost none
of his vigour
*Standpoint*
Simon Schama takes the reader through a grand sweep of Jewish
history, but he makes it so personal you begin to feel you know the
men and women whose lives shine out from the pages, and their
foibles, and you get a sense of the fragility of their lives and
their determination to survive. It's a brilliant piece of work
*Julia Neuberger, Senior Rabbi, West London Synagogue*
Schama's speciality is to take sometimes little-known historical
figures and bring them dramatically to life. We are presented with
a glittering cast of Jews from every century since the 15th ...
Belonging shows Jews as prize-fighters and charlatans, theatre
managers and physicians, writers, actors, painters, farmers and
musicians. They are men and women of every sort, who leap off the
pages as they struggle with what Schama has defined as the abiding
challenge of Jewish life in the diaspora
*Jewish Chronicle*
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