Word: persianism
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Inevitably, the immensity of Burrow's task requires as much omission as inclusion, and from the get-go he states his intention to bypass memoirs. Fortunately, at first, he seems to forget his own criterion. For instance, several pages are devoted to Xenophon's The Persian Expedition, a masterful account of a small Greek army trapped behind enemy lines, deep in the heart of the Persian Empire. Yet one of the stars of the show was Xenophon himself, his book a subtle piece of self-promotion. Likewise, Burrow makes a welcome exception for a memoir by Bernal...
...shift in the way the past has come to be packaged. When Burrow was a boy, he learned Latin and translated the Roman historians Livy and Tacitus. Today, children still learn about, say, the Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans under King Leonidas stood up to several thousand invading Persian troops, refusing to retreat and meeting certain death. But now their source is Frank Miller's graphic novel 300, the movie it inspired, or the video-game tie-in, not the original account by Herodotus. On one level this is lamentable, but at least this tale of extraordinary heroism lives...
...armed naval units from Iran's Revolutionary Guards aggressively challenged three U.S. Navy ships passing into the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz. There were no shots fired or damage caused, but no doubt this was an Iranian reminder to the United States that the Gulf is called the Persian Gulf for a reason. And the Iranians chose Hormuz, the only real egress for Gulf oil, to remind us that they have their hand on the world's oil spigot...
...year the first British warship passed into the Gulf and established an uninterrupted Western dominance over one of the most strategic bodies of water in the world. Iranian thinking is that the U.S. will get tired of Iraq, leave, and let fall the first domino in a new Persian empire. When Iranian President Ahmadinejad crowed about the National Intelligence Estimate - the one absolving Iran of building a nuclear bomb - being a "declaration of surrender," he had the Gulf in mind...
Tandem Technologies' ship had sailed. Literally. The cargo vessel promised to the young water-treatment company by the U.S. Maritime Administration was instead deployed to the Persian Gulf in 2002. Tandem's founder, Robert Lyles III, a recent graduate of Kenyon College, had planned to conduct research on the ship that would prove to investors the promise of the technique he had developed for treating the ballast water taken on by ships. And no ship could mean no funding. The sudden setback might have sunk Tandem. But surprisingly, it set the company on an unexpected new course--skin care...