検索キーワード： 著者 "Peter Kriger" すべてのカテゴリー

Everybody admitted it at the same time. The whole internet looked up from its phone and confessed that yes, actually, it thinks about the Roman Empire constantly. We turned it into a joke because that is what we do with things that scare us a little. But the joke had a secret inside it, and the secret is this: we cannot stop thinking about Rome because we never actually left it. This book takes the meme seriously without taking itself seriously at all. It argues something genuinely strange and genuinely true—that Rome didn't collapse so much as migrate.

Jeder weiß, was Kriege verursacht. Hass verursacht Kriege. Grausamkeit, Gier, der Mob, der Tyrann, der gebrochene Mann, der etwas beweisen will. Wenn man die Schlimmsten unter uns beschuldigt, scheint die Rechnung aufzugehen. Es funktioniert nicht. Ein einzelner, grausamer Mann kann eine Straße verwüsten. Um ein Land zu zerstören, braucht es Tausende von Menschen, die pünktlich erscheinen, ihre Versprechen halten, ihre Rationen teilen, einander nicht im Stich lassen und all dies auch dann tun, wenn Flucht der vernünftigere Weg wäre. Krieg lebt nicht von unseren Lastern.

You have lost a fight to a housefly. Everyone has. It was not close. Measured in its own body lengths, a fly moves faster than any aircraft humanity has ever built, rolls faster than a fighter jet, and reacts ten times more quickly than the hand coming toward it. None of this is because the fly is clever. It has a brain smaller than a grain of rice and no plans for the weekend. It wins because it is small, and small is not a scaled-down copy of our world. It is a different world, with a different set of forces in charge. This is a tour of that discovery and of everything it quietly demolishes.

Todos sabemos qué causa la guerra. El odio causa la guerra. La crueldad, la codicia, la turba, el tirano, el hombre destrozado con algo que demostrar. Culpa a lo peor de nosotros, y la lógica parece funcionar. No funciona. Un hombre cruel, actuando solo, puede arruinar una calle. Para arruinar un país se necesitan miles de personas que lleguen puntuales, cumplan sus promesas, compartan sus raciones, se nieguen a abandonarse mutuamente y sigan haciendo todo esto incluso cuando huir sería lo más sensato. La guerra no se basa en nuestros vicios.

For four hundred years, most of the Middle East was not a collection of countries. It was a set of provinces, and provinces do not have foreign ministries. They have tax registers, religious courts, and a distant capital that keeps the important decisions for itself. When that capital vanished after the First World War, the region inherited everything except the one skill that turns a territory into a state: the practice of dealing with the world outside as an equal. This book is about what happened next, and about why it is still happening.

For three centuries, the people of the North were the primary security problem of Christian Europe. Today their descendants award the Peace Prize, mediate other nations’ wars, and appear at the top of every index of trust and decency anyone has thought to construct.

Everyone knows how the Middle Ages ended. Gunpowder arrived, the armored horseman became a museum piece, castles fell, feudalism collapsed, and the modern world walked in through the breach. It is a wonderful story. Almost none of it survives contact with the evidence. The finest plate armor ever made was produced after firearms were common, and the best armorers advertised their work by shooting it and leaving the dent. Heavy cavalry went on deciding battles for three hundred years after the first cannon appeared on a European field.

Around the year 1200 BC, the most connected world that had ever existed came apart. From the palaces of Mycenae to the harbors of the Levant, from the Hittite capital in the Anatolian highlands to the grain barges of the Nile, a web of kingdoms had spent three centuries learning to depend on one another for tin and copper, grain and gold, marriage alliances and mutual defense. Within two generations, most of it was gone. Cities burned, scripts were forgotten, and the survivors remembered the age they had lost as a vanished dream of heroes.

A barbarian king sacked Rome in the year 410, and fifteen hundred years later teenagers are still being blamed for it. They do not know this. Neither, for that matter, did the cathedral builders, the horror novelists, or the engineers now training machines in dim rooms. They are all, every one of them, characters in the same long misunderstanding, and the misunderstanding has a name. The name is Goth. This is the biography of a single word that should never have travelled as far as it did.

Some films refuse you everything. They withhold explanation. They dwell on rain and rust and silent faces. They impose a length that feels, for the first twenty minutes, like an insult. And then they move into you and stay for the rest of your life. Meanwhile the film that gave you everything is forgotten by the time you reach the parking lot. This book begins with that puzzle, and it does not stay with cinema for long.

No hominid was ever built to rule an empire. The equipment we carry for reading a face, keeping a promise, fearing the disapproval of the people around us, and feeling another person's pain was forged for groups small enough that everyone knew everyone. Take that ancient apparatus, seat it above millions, and cut away every correction the group once supplied, and the mind does not rise to the occasion. It deforms — and it deforms in the same direction every time.

For five centuries we have told ourselves a flattering story: that the peoples who lived along the Great Lakes and across the Canadian Shield were simple, and that the newcomers who arrived by ship were advanced. This book takes that story apart, gently and completely. Every society that has ever lasted had to solve the same short list of problems. It had to feed its people, keep them warm, bring them clean water, move them across distance, remember its laws, defend its homes, settle its quarrels, and teach its children who they were.

Un rey bárbaro saqueó Roma en el año 410, y mil quinientos años después, todavía se culpa a los adolescentes. Ellos lo ignoran. Tampoco lo sabían, por cierto, los constructores de catedrales, los novelistas de terror ni los ingenieros que ahora entrenan máquinas en salas oscuras. Todos ellos son, sin excepción, personajes de un mismo malentendido, y ese malentendido tiene un nombre: Goth. Esta es la biografía de una sola palabra que jamás debió haber llegado tan lejos.