BookBrowse Reviews The West by Naoíse Mac Sweeney

It's become common for history books and courses to reconsider the emphasis on "Western Civilization" that dominated education for decades, including its canon of mostly white male authors who celebrated the West as superior to all other regions and peoples. It's also common to witness a backlash against that reconsideration, which comes complete with hand-wringing over cultural relativism and laments about de-valuing Western heritage. As Naoíse Mac Sweeney shows in her latest book, however, this heritage, based on Greco-Roman antiquity and taught as the bastion of culture for western Europe and North America, is actually a rather recent development in a much longer and more complex story. By profiling fourteen individuals—some well-known, others obscure—she uses their lives and works as examples of the cultural milieu in which these individuals lived. Through them she...