Naoíse Mac Sweeney delivers an exploration of how "Western Civilization"—the concept of a single cultural inheritance extending from ancient Greece to modern times—is a figment of our collective imagination.
Some of the figures in her gallery are well known (Herodotus, Francis Bacon), while others are more obscure ... Her capsule biographies also present a number of fascinating counterfactuals ...
But for all her broadsides against the concept of Western civilization, Mac Sweeney is adamant that her book is not an attack on the West, and that its transmissibility and mutability are what she, a British-born academic of Irish-Chinese parentage who teaches in Vienna, seems to find worth preserving about it.
All this is presented in fluent and accessible prose, and Ms. Mac Sweeney skillfully blends analysis, erudition and anecdote. Inevitably, in a book of this scope, there are some misfires ... Oddly, Ms. Mac Sweeney doesn’t really address the emergence of the West as a political concept. Surprisingly, she says little about the importance of Athenian democracy or about the broad movement toward wider participation that created so much of what we now regard as characteristic of the West.
One by one she takes on hoary old myths... explodes them with panache, and leaves us instead with a richer, fuller understanding of epochs, worldviews and fascinating individuals from the past ... Though this argument again treads over familiar ground, Mac Sweeney’s gift for sparkling synthesis and gripping personal vignettes never flags. She’s especially alert to the many reinterpretations of Greco-Roman antiquity that accompanied every new fabrication of "western civilisation.
