Word: edens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Thus Part I of the anti-'92 crusade is calumny for Columbus and his legacy. Part II is hagiography, singing of the saintedness of the Indians in their pre-Columbian Eden, a land of virtue, empathy and ecological harmony. With Columbus, writes Sale, Europe "implanted its diseased and dangerous seeds in . the soils of the continents that represented the last best hope for humankind -- and destroyed them...
Most, however, continued to the hills. Somewhere between Turkey and Iraq, the mountains are providing shelter for farmer-poet Mohammed Said and his wife and children. A few weeks ago, during the brief brush with freedom, he had allowed a display of ethnic pride: "I am the rose of Eden, I am the flame that lights the Kurdish darkness, I am the offspring of the Mittani, the Kassites, the Hurrians and the Medes. I am cousin to Alexander the Great, and the juice of the pomegranate drips from my lips like wine." Finally, he said, the suffering of his people...
...myth of Eden records the first trauma of homelessness. Home, after that expulsion, is what we make, what we build. We build our own home again, endlessly, in memory of Eden, or hope of it. Past or future. The present is never contented, perfection is hypothetical, and home is always incomplete...
...there is much to censure and correct in the record that begins with Columbus. U.S. textbooks are just beginning to give proper emphasis to pre-Columbian cultures. Sale's iconoclastic biography is as one-sided as a lawyer's brief, but the evidence of European disdain for the conquered Eden and its inhabitants is hard to challenge. Between 1492 and 1514, as a result of disease and accumulated atrocities, the native Taino population on the island of Hispaniola shrank from an estimated 8 million to 28,000. By 1560 the Taino were extinct...
...Doug Eden (Penn...