Poor Writing Devalues Assertions

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	• 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance Gavin Menzies Blackstone Audiobooks, Inc., 2008 - 1 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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Poor Writing Devalues Assertions

In principle, I am very sympathetic to Mr. Menzies. I found his previous book, 1421, about the treasure fleets and their exploration of the world to be very compelling. If not an open and shut case, he provided a lot of good evidence to support his claims. The idea that Chinese maps of the world played a part in getting Western sailors to start exploring seems quite likely. In this book, he expands his claims for the Chinese, trying to find a link between Chinese fleets and the beginning of the Renaissance. Here, he stumbles a bit.

Leaving aside for a moment the validity of the claims he makes, there is a major problem with this book: it's simply not very well written. Menzies didn't show himself to be a particularly strong writer with his last book but it was easy to look past his weaknesses because that book was focused, well-argued, and entertaining in its controversiality. In this book, all of Menzies' weaknesses come to the fore.

First of all, this book stinks with Menzies' desperation to be believed. There was some of this in 1421 but it's worse here. If I'm not convinced by everything he asserts, I think he puts forth ideas worth investigating. But it's hard to follow him through the growing undercurrent of persecution. Second, he wanders all over the place here. He revises and rehashes some of the arguments he made in 1421. He finds Chinese links to the development of Western astronomy, mathematics, printing, firearms, steel and the work of famous names like Copernicus and Da Vinci. But, third, his supporting materials this time around do not have the impact of the maps and artifacts from his last book. (I, for one, see very little similarity between the Chinese drawings he shows and the Renaissance drawings.) Finally, and most irritating to me anyway, he constantly refers the reader to his website. I don't want a book that's a companion piece to a website. I want a well-argued case in the text.

Of course, we must then come to the claims he makes about the Chinese influence on the discoveries of the Renaissance. Ultimately, I came away feeling he tried to claim too much for the Chinese, which is too bad because it undermines the fact that the Chinese did have a long history of discovery (see Joseph Needham's work) and they certainly did have an influence on Western thought. However, by the thirteenth century, well before the dates Menzies is discussing here, Western Europe was awaking to the influence of the ancient Greeks and Romans and the Arabic/Islamic world as well as the East, via the Silk Road and other avenues of trade and travel. To find a direct causal link between the landing of a fleet in Italy in 1434 and the birth of the Renaissance goes a bit too far.

And, for me, there is always that nagging fact that the Chinese did little with their great discoveries. The Chinese are surely to be admired but, isolated and homogeneous, they were content to keep the outside world at bay. In the simmering West, however, these ideas boiled over into the creation of the modern world. Does it matter that the Chinese invented paper and block printing centuries before these things appeared in the West? Granted, it's interesting. However, it was Gutenberg's work that exploded the production of books that changed the world. (And Gutenberg's work of over two years to perfect his process seems to indicate that he didn't copy directly from anyone.)

Anyone who knows me knows the admiration I have for the Chinese. And I think it's great to have someone out there like Mr. Menzies, putting Chinese discoveries in the limelight and trying to find connections between East and West. But I take a more balanced view of the historical development of the topics Mr. Menzies discusses. I don't think it's necessary that he take a more balanced approach, but I do think it's necessary for him to make a better argument, write a better book.

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Fun but without evidence

This is, like 1421: The Year China Discovered America (P.S.), a well written fun account of a story that will leave many interested to learn more. It poses a radical hypothesis. But like all things, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and in this case there are almost no shreds of evidence to back any of this up. Thus one is left with a sort of Da vinci code type chase through the sources where alluding to ideas and facts is more important than the facts themselves. For these reasons this eminent author leaves the reader spell bound but to call this history is to stretch things a bit.

In the end, if it makes people more interested in the famous voyages of exploration launched by the Chinese, than it was worth it.

Seth J. Frantzman

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The rest of the story...

In his book "1434: The Year a Magnificent chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance", Gavin Menzies explains how Europe rose out of the dark ages into enlightenment in such a short amount of time. They had help from the Chinese! While it had been long assumed the knowledge of ancient Greece served as the basis for the Renaissance, 1434 provides another perspective. Europe's enlightenment was fueled by it's interaction with China. While 1434 is an easy read, it has enough quotes and references to substantiate it's position that the Chinese should be credited with starting the European Renaissance.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

The New York Times bestselling author of 1421 presents compelling new evidence that the European Renaissance was spurred in large part by Chinese advances in science, art, and technology.