Survival of the Sickest

  
Title: Survival of the Sickest – A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

Author: Sharon Moalem with Jonathan Prince

Publisher: William Morrow, 2007 (First)

ISBN: 978-0-00-725886-4

Pages: 267

We know that mankind reached the stage it now occupies through a series of evolutions over eons of geological time. We also know that evolution is blind. The random mutation may tend to tip the organism in a beneficial or devastating path. If the random change is indeed beneficial, natural selection acts upon it and confers a genetic advantage to the living being by making it the creator of many offspring. Increase in progeny means more copies of genes that gave the creature the advantage in the first place. This being the prime mover of evolution, we sometimes wonder at the widespread prevalence of disease in our midst. Especially when we learn that a disease is prevalent in a particular society, we are left guessing at why evolution has not stamped out the deviant behavior after playing with it for so much time. Sharon Moalem addresses this specific issue and explains why we need disease to prevail in human societies. Citing a few examples, he maintains that those diseases might have conferred some advantage to its victims against some other menace which is equally life threatening. Patients suffering from hemochromatosis have some genetic advantage against plague; people with Type 1 diabetes perform better than others in conditions of extreme cold, quoting two examples from the book. The author discusses the mechanism of how this happens and touches upon many controversial yet interesting subjects that are at the cutting edge of biological research. Sharon Moalem has a Ph.D. in human physiology and has published several papers in immunology. He lives in New York. One note of caution is valid here though – don’t take everything the author claims in a serious note.

The reader must be prepared to receive some shocking information about quite common diseases like diabetes. A large portion of the population is forced to lead a less than satisfying lifestyle due to this malady common everywhere on the planet. Who would’ve guessed the benefits this disease had conferred on its victims in the evolutionary past? We read with astonishment that diabetes might have helped ancient people to survive in extreme cold during a sudden ice age that swept across the northern hemisphere 12000 years ago, called ‘Younger Dryas’ (being the name of an arctic flower whose pollen was found in lower latitudes during that age). A major proportion of the living population might have perished in the numbing cold. The natural advantage of diabetics in the cold is established with help from the example of an arctic frog which possess antifreeze proteins in its blood stream. These eject water from the body when cold begins and the blood become concentrated with sugar. Similar is the case with diabetics. Having a higher concentration of blood sugar, and ejecting water through frequent urination, the unforgiving ailment in the present era must have stood them in good stead by providing a survival advantage during the ice age. This caused the gene to proliferate and become quite common in the society. Moalem proposes this to be the reason behind large percentage of diabetics in Scandinavia than in tropical regions.

The author has gone full throttle in cherry-picking controversial topics for each of the book’s chapters. And nowhere it goes the whole hog than on the section on epigenetics. Here, we get an impression that Moalem had unnecessarily complicated a genuine area of earnest scientific interest by painting it in the bad light of Lamarckism. The attempts to strike at the sanctum sanctorum of evolution theory – random mutation and natural selection. Since no particular gene can be pinpointed as the cause of a perceived effect – genes being too complicated for that - evolution’s driver of random mutation which changes only one or two nucleotides is not enough to explain evolution, according to Moalem. On the other hand, he proposes the concept of ‘jumping genes’ in which a portion of the genome may be copied and pasted to another location on the DNA, and changing the phenotype that new location corresponds to. This can happen under the infection of retroviruses too. What the book tries to establish is that such wholesale genome change is to be attributed to rapid evolution. And then the issue of epigenetics is also to be thought about, which explains selective turning on and off of genes when certain methyl groups get attached to sections of the genome. In this case, the genome would be producing results totally different from a similar person, say, an identical twin. For them, the DNA is the same immediately after birth, but changes accumulate as the siblings age. The contrast is the more striking when the separation between the individuals is more. Such changes in DNA may also occur under the influence of drugs, some of which are administered to aid the child in gestation. The scenario is a scary one. The medicine you give to the expecting mother, like vitamins, folic acid and the like, has the potential to cause some deleterious effect on the children, and in rare cases, even the grand children! Ubiquitous cases of obesity in America is thought to be a side effect of certain drugs ingested by the mother during pregnancy. What Moalem wants to establish is that some characteristics acquired by the parent may be transferred to the offspring through these jumping genes or epigenetics, but the argument falls short of providing convincing evidence. When you put forward an extraordinary claim to remake the fundamentals of evolution, the proof must also be extraordinary. But the book miserably fails on this aspect and the evidence nowhere rises higher than the level of anecdotes. This unwanted tirade against a well-established concept, without satisfactory backup, has downgraded the book’s rating by a notch. If this chapter had been worded differently, the book might’ve scored a 4-star instead of the 3-star if enjoys now. But to grant justice to the author, he has warned that he is quoting from controversial research papers whenever such material was used. Probably, such liberal borrowing from bold, but controversial material has imparted good readability to the book!

The book is neat, tidy and quite easy to read. Even those of use who has only a basic exposure to biology would find it interesting, informative, easy to follow and exciting. Since man is naturally curious to know the ways a feature progresses through the progeny, chapters on genetics paves the way for engrossing reading. However, Moalem assigns undue importance to the practices followed by old custom and argues that there is strong scientific basis to it. This seems to be far fetched. People afflicted with the disease hemochromatosis may be relieved by letting out blood, but that can’t be understood to be the motive behind bloodletting as a general form of medical practice widely followed all over the world once upon a time, but discouraged now. The author’s phrase of ‘where there is smoke of custom, there is bound to be medical fire’ is crossing all limits of proportion.

Organic farming is the craze of the newly rich and overly health conscious people. The book presents an illuminating counter-argument which proves a downside of organic agriculture. Celery plants produce a toxin called psoralen, which causes changes in DNA and ill effects in humans. This psoralen is produced in copious quantities when the plant senses an attack – in the form of a worm or pest that is munching on its leaves or stem. The amount of psoralen can be up to a hundred fold in such bruised plants. When you apply synthetic pesticides, the plant is protected from physical attack. Organic farmers don’t use pesticides, and the plant is exposed to some attack, and psoralen level in the plant is increased. It all ends up with the curious result of avoiding poison outside the plant, only to end up with poison inside it.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

A Study of History, Vol 3

 

Title: A Study of History, Vol 3 – The Growths of Civilizations

Author: Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1985 (First published 1935)

ISBN: 978-0-19-215209-1

Pages: 551

Toynbee continues his study through this third volume in the series by analyzing the source, nature and ways of growths of civilizations. In the first two parts, he specified what a civilization is and how one such society sprouts its first shoots as a response to challenges from physical or human sphere of influences. This volume discusses about the criteria of growth, because once something takes birth, it is the next step to take. This does not take place automatically, and this volume is a catalog of several false starts and stillbirths. A creative minority in the society puts forward original ideas which might be ridiculed by the unthinking majority of the population. The pioneers then withdraw to seclusion in which the metamorphosis of development of the idea takes place. In the fullness of time, such savants return to the society and conquer the minds of the majority with their seed of originality. This takes deep root in the society and it moves forward on the path of development. We see from the numerous examples cited in the volume that this principle is faithfully followed by all civilizations in the world. The author appends an index which covers the first three volumes with this part.

Once a society crosses the threshold of stimulus and response, growth of civilization is the logical next step. However, this is not guaranteed to take place on its own. In some cases, the adaptation may happen to be greatly in step with the physical challenge that the society is placed in a predicament in which it becomes impossible to modify its behaviour to changing circumstances and the civilization becomes arrested at the level. Toynbee’s statement of the fact may be thus summarized but the justification of the argument is long drawn out and thorough. The four civilizations, the Eskimos, Nomads, Osmanlis and Sparta are cited as examples. All these faced an immense challenge in the human or physical arenas in which the Nomads were forced to migrate to desert oases according to the season of the year. The people are slaves to the climate, just like the Eskimos are guided by the vagaries of snowfall. The characteristics picked up by the barbarians don’t leave them easily even after they have established a flourishing civilization. Nomads make use of animal assistance in the form of horses and dogs to watch over the cattle. The author establishes that the Spartans and Osmanlis (Ottoman Turks) exhibit this trait of nomadism by recruiting slaves from the subject population and keeping them as watchdogs over the human cattle. A bright narrative follows in which the in and out of Janissary system of Turks and the ‘Agoge’ of ancient Spartans are enunciated in precise detail. Ottomans took slaves from their Christian subjects In Europe and Caucasus, trained them in selected professions, converted them into Islam and made them work in administration and military of the Porte. These Janissaries carried the day forward and even rose to the position of Vizier, and sons of female slaves borne of the king even ascended the throne. The Osmanli’s made use of this system of human watchdogs to guard over human cattle, because the streak of nomadism runs straight through their ancestry in the European Steppe.

The criterion for the growth of a civilization is to be found out next. Toynbee argues that mere geographic expansion or a supreme command of the human environment is not an indicator of growth. In fact, these are symptoms of the civilization’s disintegration. This counter-intuitive proposition is brought home by a plethora of examples plucked out of the pages of world history. Hellenic Civilization reached its widest geographical frontiers under Alexander the Great, but that was during the disintegration phase, with the emperor himself coming out to the stage as a barbarian. Similarly, Roman civilization enjoyed its zenith after the successful prosecution of the Punic wars, but the empire entered its path to decline immediately thereafter. In the human sphere too, the situation is not at all different. The expansion of a society in the human environment may be thought of as borrowing of artistic, political, social or military techniques of that society by other populations. This also does not constitute a criterion of growth.

Then, how do we know whether a society is in the growth phase of civilization? A new concept of ‘Withdrawal and Return’ is postulated at this point. The first spark of creative genius is born in a single person, or among a few people in a society. The rest of the populace may mock at these gifted few. They then withdraw from the general stream of popular life and sharpen their intellect and ideas. At a opportune time this creative minority returns to the midst of the society which alienated or drove them out a short while before. But this time, the creative challenge would have evoked a brilliant response, made all the more attractive through embellishments accumulated over those years when the creative minority was steeped in an apparent hibernation. Suddenly, the idea catches on public imagination and the majority takes to it by mimesis. This puts in motion the wheels of civilizations to progress. The author argues with evidence of examples that this is the process through which a society grows. Not only individual people, but penalized minorities also may follow the path of ‘withdrawal and return’ to pull off the vehicle of growth on their way. Toynbee’s examples are plenty and convincing but one may have doubts on the veracity of at least a few of them, like Paul Von Hindenburg, the German administrator, or Clarendon, the English historian whose biographies are quoted as proof of his concept of ‘Withdrawal and Return’.

The volume ends with the way in which industrialism and democracy triumphed in the western world that went on to conquer the whole world on the cultural plane. These ideals were not compatible with a locally self-sufficient agricultural society burdened with feudalism that carried a despotic monarch on its back. Medieval Italy demonstrated the alternative concept of city-states that relied on commerce and industry. The challenge of transforming the feudal structure to make it compatible with city-states was taken up in every kingdom, but the successful response was obtained in England which then stood as a role model for other societies to imitate these ideals of industrialism and democracy.

Eruption of nomads from the steppes of Asia and Africa had upset the balance of sedentary populations on the edges of grasslands. The factor that put these aggressive behaviour in motion had not been fully understood, but the author proposes a fine idea to explain this recurrent phenomena. Toynbee proposes two factors to account for this – climatic as well as human. The aridity of the steppe changes over a period. With the conclusions of Ellsworth Huntington, it may be seen that the cycle of aridity and humidity oscillates with a period of 600 years, the first half of it being dry and the second half moist. The nomads find their habitat shrunk by advancing desert line and a as a consequence erupt to the peasant’s lands. During the second half, more of the steppe become cultivatable and the peasants take back the land, forcing many nomads to accept sedentary lifestyle or to penetrate deeper into the steppe. A comprehensive list of such eruptions that correspond to the spokes of the cycle is given and it is quite convincing. As far as the human factor is concerned, this implies the pull exerted on nomads by the vacuum created by breakdown of sedentary societies which is clearly evident from the examples listed.

Reading Toynbee is a tough experience that should be thought of as a once in a lifetime opportunity. The diction and vocabulary is so superb and the structure so crafted as to convey many interrelated ideas in a single sentence. This is the general tenure of the series, but the section on ‘An Analysis of Growth’ that looks into philosophical roots and sources of the growths of societies is really tough. You need superhuman perseverance to navigate through this thick mess of esoteric concepts taken from works of J C Smuts  and Henri Bergson. At another point, the author’s assertion that western civilization has conquered all parts of the globe and positively or negatively influences even opposition to it raised by other civilizations, is noteworthy. Mahatma Gandhi’s agitations against the Raj is referred here, but Toynbee states that even though he fights to put Indian ideals into reality, his modus operandi of meetings, resolutions, petitions and opposition is so thoroughly western and so is the path of Indian industry as against Gandhi’s own ideals . The textile mills of Ahmedabad uses western production methods and present as big to a contrast to Gandhi’s ideal of homespun cloth as the textile factories of Manchester. This comparison presented on old dichotomy in a clear light.  

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The TCS Story

Title: The TCS Story…And Beyond

Author: S Ramadorai

Publisher: Portfolio Penguin, 2011 (First)

ISBN: 978-0-670-08490-6

Pages: 287

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is a premier enterprise in the IT sector in India that has footprints on a global level. TCS pioneered the growth of software and hardware services industry in India, right from 1968. Being a glamorous and highly paying sector, finding employment in IT is still the dream of most of the engineering graduates in the country. Naturally, this book appeals to a large swathe of readers who wish to follow the birth of the industry, the tribulations it had to undergo, the maturing phase and becoming the fountainhead of innovation in India. And who is more competent than Subramaniam Ramadorai, TCS’ CEO and MD from 1996 to his retirement in 2009 and is still the Vice Chairman of the company? With a repertoire of 37 years of dedicated service to the organization, as a humble programmer to the CEO of the mighty organization that TCS had become in 2009, Ramadorai saw the growth of the company from modest beginnings to one of the largest IT-services company in the world. In addition to a splendid innings as an industry captain, Ramadorai also worked as the Prime Minister’s advisor in National Skill Development Council. This exposure has widened the author’s perception of the company’s path towards the future and is evident from the lengthy chapters on the nation’s priorities and how IT can act an enabler of those lofty schemes. If you are expecting a detailed narrative of the growth of TCS interspersed with amusing anecdotes, you are going to be thoroughly disappointed. Ramadorai’s style is purely matter-of-fact and his long essays on how the IT industry should guide the nation’s progress are helpful only for students who want to compile school projects on these issues. The first part of the book, that is, from the author’s joining TCS to his rise as CEO is somewhat readable, but the second half is sheer rhetoric and dry oration.

Before going directly for the TCS story, Ramadorai begins with a good self-introduction and the background that prompted him join in TCS. As a reflection of the changing times and liberal mores of modern India, the author, even though born in a Tamil Brahmin family, didn’t experience any restrictions in studying or getting employed abroad. He completed his post graduation in the U.S and worked there for some time before joining the TCS. Conditions in India were not at all conducive to business under the draconian tentacles of the License-Quota-Permit Raj and the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act. It stifled enterprises making it virtually impossible for an Indian company to set up operations abroad or for a foreign company to start its business in India. However, Ramadorai makes only a cursory mention of the business climate, without pausing to make a dig at the failed policies in Nehru-Indira socialism. In this regard, the book is not a faithful mirror of the times, as the author falls short of exposing the skeletons in the chest. Probably he didn’t want to upset the politicians whose ancestors were instrumental in keeping India chained motionless to the steel pole of government control. Computerization was understood as a crime in the 1970s and 80s. The author tells an informative story of how TCS came to possess an ICL1903 mainframe when such equipments were hard to come by in India. LIC had bought this machine for their headquarters in Kolkata. However, the leftist unions opposed its commissioning on the grounds of perceived job losses. Militant trade unionism is still a curse in India as it was in those times. Finally LIC had no other option open to them than to sell the computers at reduced rates to TCS! Similar interesting anecdotes make up the first part of the book, the story from 1968 when TCS was born, to 1996 when the company matured in the software and services industry. The narration always steers clear of controversies and is somewhat pompous. How else can one account for a declaration like “I saw the TCS job as an opportunity to train our people on new technologies and one day make this available to Indian markets when they were ready for it” (p.34) and “for TCS, it was always about building the brand and the creation of vital infrastructure for the country, the value and profitability of the project was often secondary” (p.71)?

After Ramadorai took over as CEO in 1996, the company had a prodigious rise in fortunes. The CEO’s mission of reaching ‘Top 10 by 2010’ was successfully achieved, in part because it had a chief who believed that “a CEO must have a strong working knowledge of the technical environment he is managing”. The growth of software industry that catered to an international audience was also due to strict import curbs imposed by earlier Indian regimes, in which no company was allowed to import anything, unless they gave a undertaking to the effect that they would earn twice the import costs as export over a span of five years. So, importing mainframes and computers mandated them to export services and reclaim the money. TCS adopted its CEO’s motto that “business is as much about building relationships as it is about technical capabilities”. Retiring in 2009, the author could well have taken pride of the fact that he led a premier institution that made the IT industry in India and was beholden to national priorities and committed to fine business ethics dictated by Tata’s respectable business methodology.

Ramadorai was an advisor to the Prime Minister in the National Skill Development Council. Possibly, such wider ambitions justify chapters in the book that goes much ‘beyond’ the TCS story. The chapter on ‘Technology as the enabler of development’ is one such. It perfectly lacks any connection to the author’s work in TCS, but purports to create an air of a political speech or the inauguration address of a knowledgeable politician. The chapter never rises above the level of a newspaper editorial and could’ve been written by a bright college student who follows developments closely. Some of the ideas seem outdated too. The author’s explorations urge the administration to invest in telemedicine, e-health and distance learning, in a bid to transport the benefits of technology to the villages so as to serve as the enabler for rural folk. This idea is clearly out of sync with contemporary needs. These options were highly relevant about 2 or 3 decades ago and the government addressed this issue in its right spirit. Now, after so much time, the effort must be to build brick and mortar solutions for education and health services. Technology-enabled services should migrate to other more value-added services on the ladder, such as banking, high speed communications and access to government services.

The book is really a manifesto of how the IT industry came into being in India and the growth of channels open to it in the changing times. Most of the time, the narration drops to the level of business presentations with no honest effort at telling the story of TCS in  a gripping way Especially the latter part of the book that chronicle’s the author’s years as CEO is nothing but self-congratulatory adulation about the company’s work. The matter and its presentation is unattractive and test the reader’s patience. The commitment that TCS is claimed to practice towards its customers is not employed by the author towards his readers. The latter half of the book is mostly detailed description of some corporate dossier. There is nothing more here than an inquisitive person could gather from the internet with a Google search with the words “IT and shaping modern India’ or some such terms.                

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

A Study of History, Vol 2

Title: A Study of History, Vol 2 – The Geneses of Civilizations, Part 2

Author: Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1985 (First published 1935)

ISBN: 978-0-19-215208-4

Pages: 452

In this sequel to Volume 1, which introduced the concept of historical study and attempted to set the stage on the discussion of the geneses of civilizations, Toynbee develops the principles and completes the description on the geneses of civilizations. The theory of Challenge and Response that postulates the development of civilization as a response to challenges coming from human and physical environments is further elaborated and concluded with a flourish. The author categorizes the challenges as originating from hard geography, new ground, blows and pressures from neighbouring societies and also penalization from a dominant counterpart. With a multitude of illuminating examples, each of the postulates is examined threadbare and proved. In the end, the idea of a ‘Golden Mean’ is introduced, that the individual societies’ civilizational response to challenges will be the maximum when the harshness of it is at an optimum – not too harsh or too easy. The book also contains a hypothetical analysis of the course history would have followed, if several abortive civilizations had been able to fend off their devastation against their foes that resulted in their annihilation at various points in time.

The second volume begins with a categorical debunking of the myth that civilizations emerge at sites where nature provides man with bountiful produce. Toynbee establishes that the opposite is true in this case, that is, whenever the land is sufficiently fertile for agriculture, or packed with game, the societies inhabiting these gardens of Eden never pass out of the primitive stage. Civilization emerges when the terrain is so unproductive that the society makes hard decisions about how best to convert the challenge they are facing into a stimulus for change. The empirical study in support of this argument is replete with examples from around the world. We see it in Roman Campagna, in Capua, in Central America and may other places. Then, the stimulus exerted by hard countries work out miraculous pathways for the society to expand and impose its will on its less adventurous neighbors. A case of Attica and Boeotia in Greece extols the point in convincing detail. Boeotia is an agriculturally well endowed country which presents no challenge to the resident. This soporific affect on the moral fiber of the society has caused unmitigated reversals in the political front, as Boeotia was always a subjugated neighbor among her peers. Attica was different in that the land was rocky, with poor rainfall and unfit for cultivation of grain. So the inhabitants tried olive as the crop. The fruit and oil it produced had to be sold in overseas markets for Attica to import its food grains. This caused the Attic people to develop commercial ties with cities in the Aegean basin and to cultivate a powerful military regime that was maritime in its scope. This affluence paved the way for the efflorescence of ancient Greece. This example may be correlated mutatis mutandis to other places and the idea is the same.

New territory and human interaction are the cause of stimulus that is the fountain head of the birth of civilizations. When societies acquire new ground by conquest or assimilation, its institutions flourish on virgin soil much deeper than the place of origin. Being an empirical study, there is no dearth of examples suitably dressed up to stand witness to the author’s theory. He makes a curious observation regarding Hinduism’s growth in South India in this regard – India’s ancient religion grew out of the Indic Civilization and crowned as its universal church in the Gangetic plain. It percolated to the south during the first few centuries of Common Era and has struck deeper roots there than on the shores of the Ganga where it sprouted. A related source of stimulus is the interaction with barbarians outside the pale who are generally at loggerheads with the civilization in question. Toynbee argues that the vitality originated from the stimulus obtained by pressure from outside plays a crucial role in the maturing of a civilization. Again, the arguments are supported by a plethora of samples. The life strength of the society will be concentrated on the frontier marches in its all out bid to win over the outsiders. And once its objective is vindicated, the stimulus disappears and the locus of the creative spirit moves again to another frontier where this civilization is threatened by external human factors.

The argument in this volume concludes with the formulation of a theory of the ‘Golden Mean’. Challenge and response don’t work in a linear way. When the challenge goes on increasing, response breaks down at some point, from the excess stimulation. Similarly, when it goes down, response may fail to be produced. The ideal return is generated when the challenge is optimized. One example, out of the several cited, proves the point. The Scandinavian society had its home in Norway, but being adventurous, they migrated, and in a series of explorations called Viking invasions colonized Iceland and Greenland. The flower of Scandinavian civilization blossomed in Iceland, where their social, political and literary achievements far surpassed those at their home in Norway. This is due to the lack of challenge in Norway, but which existed in Iceland due to the rugged terrain and harsh climate. However, the stimulation thus originated in Iceland couldn’t be sustained in Greenland where the harshness multiplied manifold and the budding civilization withered. With the establishment of the concept of the Golden Mean, Toynbee ends his second volume, by formulating the principles that lead to geneses of civilizations.

Toynbee’s pioneering effort to formulate a theoretical framework to the flow of history doesn’t have parallels among scholars in the wideness of cited examples and the depth of analysis of the events. But a few chinks in the armor may be identified. As a part of justification for the theory of stimulus from difficult terrain, he identifies a location in New England which the initial English-speaking conquerors had abandoned when they moved on to the west in America’s bid to claim the whole landmass between the oceans. French Canadians filled in the vacuum left behind by the founding fathers. The author observed the newcomers at work in this town, and then speculates that the country was equally challenging as it was when it was first subdued, and in due course, the new inhabitants may assume the mantle of kicking forward the onward march of civilization of their own. But this assertion turned out to be false, with the benefit of hindsight. The French newcomers merged gradually into the melting pot of American society, without leaving a trace of the constituents’ origins. Likewise, the author’s guess falls short of what actually happened in China. Its capital frequently changed between Peking and Nanking. The former was nearer to the barbarian frontier and was ideally suited to handle them with its proximity to the recalcitrant border. However, by the turn of 20^th century, these nomads were assimilated to the Chinese civilization that they were no longer alien. Around this time, the capital was again shifted to Nanking as a result of popular uprising and Toynbee makes a prediction from his theory that the capital may now stay in the south, as barbarians’ menace had abated in the North and the stimulus disappeared. But again, we know that the capital was once more moved to Peking, where it stays at present. On the other hand, the author’s prescient doubts about the viability of newly formed Balkan states on the principle of national sovereignty after the end of World War 1, is proved true by later events.

The author’s outlook is scholarly, universal and liberal if we examine the content. However, non-European readers may discern a shade of mild imperialism dancing between the lines. The merits and achievements of Western Christian Civilization are heralded in every sentence he writes in this regard. No doubt about the merits of the civilization in conquering every nook and cranny of the modern world is ever expressed. Toynbee in fact believes that Africans deserve to be under European occupation for their own good! As he says about Abyssinia in 1920s, (modern Ethiopia), “she is a byword for disorder and barbarity….In fact, the spectacle presented by the one indigenous African state that has succeeded in retaining its complete independence is perhaps the best justification that can be found for the partition of the rest of Africa among the European powers” (p.365).

The book is highly recommended to serious readers of history.

Rating: 4 Star