It should not be so hard to write both poetry and fiction. Both arts, after all, make use of the same materials, words and punctuation. Poems...
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Kriwaczek has traveled a lot and writes well about what he has seen. Then he creates theories -- that this influenced that, that this undoubtedly caused that -- and is so profligate with verbiage (and references to things strange to the reader) that the images fly by, unquestioned. In fact, it is all smoke and mirrors: he has proved nothing at all. From imagining that a castle in the Caucasus built five hundred years after the Vizigoths resembles a city in France, built in the nineteenth century, 14 centuries after the Vizigoths, he deduces all sorts of untenable religious hypotheses, sums up the complications of history in Reader's Digest fashion, and sells a book that is basically travel reminiscences and historical anecdote. Entertaining but very very thin -- Freya Stark and Rebecca West did this sort of thing much better in a more scholarly era.
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In Search of Zarathustra: Across Iran and Central Asia to Find the World's First Prophet by Paul Kriwaczek
John Yohaelm, March 5, 2007
Kriwaczek has traveled a lot and writes well about what he has seen. Then he creates theories -- that this influenced that, that this undoubtedly caused that -- and is so profligate with verbiage (and references to things strange to the reader) that the images fly by, unquestioned. In fact, it is all smoke and mirrors: he has proved nothing at all. From imagining that a castle in the Caucasus built five hundred years after the Vizigoths resembles a city in France, built in the nineteenth century, 14 centuries after the Vizigoths, he deduces all sorts of untenable religious hypotheses, sums up the complications of history in Reader's Digest fashion, and sells a book that is basically travel reminiscences and historical anecdote. Entertaining but very very thin -- Freya Stark and Rebecca West did this sort of thing much better in a more scholarly era.(3 of 5 readers found this comment helpful)