Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. EDIT: tried something a bit shorter and more to the point, let me know if it's better. History teaches us that a third of Europe’s population was destroyed. To better study "what [is] there in the world," Robinson has created a unique kind of fiction, one that erases the line between fiction and the world. | April 2002 . ahh yes that's a lot better, nice simple and quick fix, sounds less redundant now :], Album Rating: 5.0excellent, thanks for pointing it out :]. it's a truly excellent album. There is a period of terrible global warfare spanning six decades during the period equivalent to the end of our 19th century and the first half of the 20th: in effect, our two world wars are conflated into one long, brutal conflict. Sometimes, it is laborious to work along with him. David Dalgleish is a Montreal-based writer. Thank you very much for your detailed review and your perspective as someone with a historical background. In this way, he is very much like Ray Bradbury. Nevertheless, The Years of Rice and Salt is for the most part a magnificent and endlessly fascinating book. :] i have seen an increasing amount of people use it, quite heart-warming :], Bands: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1541457724/years-of-rice-and-salt-nothing-of-cities-lp-cd. Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2020. Like the Mars trilogy, this book is at its heart a think-piece, and like Mars it occasionally indulges a bit in philosophical depths that I found a bit dull - long discussions about the nature of history. There is little more I would ask of a book. So many intriguing ideas that bounce around with a sorta kinda plot. David Dalgleish is a Montreal-based writer. If there is a weakness in Robinson's work, it is perhaps this; his characters are so intelligent that they never shut up and often have fascinating conversations for page after page about the engineering of fortifications or the reconciliation of Sufism and Confucianism or, most extendedly, the ways that history works. Reviewed in the United States on April 18, 2019. Years Of Rice and Salt - Nothing of Cities review: nothing new, but it doesn't pretend to be - and with this kind of quality, nor does it need to be. These individuals are members of the same jati, a group of souls whose destinies are bound together. Once upon a time, I gave this book to my good friend, who was losing her fight with leukemia. The early sections can be slow going, with their painstaking attention to detail and methodical buildup. Bout time I reached that milestone. but you could go over to a kickstarter and pledge a few dollars and you'll get a multi-format download. This one's going right in the category of OMG this is epic SF of a very serious nature and scope. In other words, it is not just a book which invents a history: it is a book about history and how it is fashioned. It is the tale of the man-eating tiger Kya and Bistami, the young scholar whom she spares and inspires, and of Katima, the proto-feminist Sultana he serves on the Islamic frontier of Northern Europe. The Years of Rice and Salt charts the course of this divergent timeline where Western hegemony never happens and the locus of power shifts to the East (and also to the South, if we're being persnickety). is modest, spiritually-inclined, gentle but resilient; K____ (Kyu, Katima, Kheim, etc.) Giving it two stars because it's an impressive feat and an imaginative retelling of history, but the story itself is dry, which makes the title fitting, and boring as all hell. Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2012. Each of The Years of Rice and Salt's 10 sections takes place in a different time and place, but they are linked by an ingenious narrative device: the principle characters are always reincarnations of the same souls. Setting himself the Scheherazadean labor of holding his readers through a chain of tales, a series of endings and beginnings in which we must let go of one story and then quickly be caught up again in the next, he pulls it off with a trapeze artist's grace. This one has really stuck with me, and continues to inform my thinking on any number of topics, not least the clash of civilizations, the impermanence of human culture, the non-inevitability of European historical domination, how indigenous American societies might have survived and thrived, and more. Here, the recurring characters are three and more souls endlessly reincarnated and struggling to remember the purpose – of universal betterment – to which they swore themselves centuries earlier. Accordingly, The Years of Rice and Salt is sometimes an arduous read. It was one of the most stimulating books I've read in a while. I found the premise of The Black Plague wiping out almost the entire population of Europe and how that would affect the socio-political development of the rest of the world to be very promising. I don't believe his religious views are deducible from the story, and for certain they're irrelevant to. They are then cast into the next life, after being karmically judged by unsympathetic gods; born anew, they forget their past selves until their next death, except for the occasional moment of déjà vu or rare transcendent experience, when they briefly escape the boundaries of their mortal selves. It is the fourteenth century and one of the most apocalyptic events in human history is set to occur—the coming of the Black Death. Are you intrigued yet? All the time they bring progress, and all the time they talk at each other. Her childhood religious conditioning was making her situation even more unpleasant, as the stories she'd been told about hell started giving her especially terrible anxiety nightmares, on top of the whole cancer thing. Done for Toronto Public Library's 2010 "Keep Toronto Reading" site. the whole album is streaming here The premise - what if the Black Plague killed 99% of Europe's population - was intriguing. David Dalgleish is a Montreal-based writer. Their previous ep is pretty sweet too. Chinese, Islam, and Buddhist religions dominated and partially colonize North and South America. In each life, they gravitate toward each other, impelled by mystic forces of attraction. | April 2002. It's one of my all-time favorite books, so I've read the print edition, and it is easier to follow who's who in that form. :]. Wel I'm happy with the trivium album I don't know whether you have seen my feature.