books

God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World Alan Mikhail Liveright Publishing Corporation August 2020

The one piece of information that American students routinely hear about the Ottoman Empire is Tsar Nicholas I’s sobriquet calling it “the sick man of Europe.” This dismissive remark was leveled at the Ottomans in their waning years in the mid-19th century, but it obscures the rich history of a former glob-al superpower. In God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World, Alan Mikhail works assiduously to dispel this misconception and to place the Ottomans where they belong— squarely in the middle of world history.

God’s Shadow chronicles Selim I, who became sultan in 1512. The book begins with his upbringing in Istanbul and his time as a provincial leader in the backwater Anatolian city of Trabzon. There, his fre-quent battles with Shiites and various other powerful groups earned him the respect and loyalty of the Janissaries, the elite military force whose support every sultan relied upon.

As was the Ottoman custom, Selim knew he would have to kill his halfbrothers to take the throne after his father, and in 1512 he took the unprecedented step of removing his still-living father from the throne. He then captured and murdered his father’s sons by other concubines (see Beyond the Book), which ensured his accession to the throne. Support from the Janissaries and Ottoman military struc-ture allowed Selim to succeed in his brazen deposition of his father, who died shortly thereafter en route to his “retirement.”

Mikhail succeeds in capturing the tension and power struggles that marked Selim’s accession, but he pauses to present a revisionist yet vital depiction of the Ottomans’ larger role in European politics. He describes how fear of the growing Ottoman Empire—and its stranglehold on EastWest trade routes—drove Christopher Columbus to seek a western path to the New World.

Americans are taught that after the Reconquista of Spain in 1492, Columbus and his Spanish crew sough “God, glory and gold,” which again obscures the role of the Ottomans. Mikhail deftly shows that a virulent desire to expel Muslims from Jerusalem and desperate tactics to avoid Ottoman trade blockades were the true drivers of Spanish colonial exploration. The violent Reconquista did not sud-denly pivot to an innocent search for India via the western route—it was a starting point for Spain’s worldwide crusade against the most powerful empire at the time.

This is an eye-opening interpretation that also helps explain Europeans’ interactions with Native Americans. Indigenous people’s culture and appearance were described as “Moorish” (i.e., Muslim), and fears were stoked regarding the possibility of Muslim African slaves converting Native Americans to Islam. Mikhail expertly ties together disparate threads showing that fear of the Ottomans was reflect-ed in conquistadors’ experiences in the New World.

From there, the author shifts his focus back eastward and relates in detail Selim’s vast territorial con-quests, defeating the Safavid empire in Iran and the Mamluks in Egypt, thus extending the Ottoman Empire across three continents. Selim’s reign was relatively short, however, and when he died unex-pectedly in 1520 at age 50, he bequeathed his massive empire to his only son, Suleyman, who was the first Ottoman sultan to avoid a bloody fratricidal struggle for the throne.

Mikhail also analyzes the Ottoman role in the Reformation, which is traditionally viewed as a Christianonly phenomenon. But as the global hegemon at the time, the Ottomans were held up both as a threat and a punishment for the corrupt Catholicism that Luther decried. The Ottomans represented the possibility of crushing defeat in battle, to be sure, but Luther also called them the “lash of iniquity” that God used “to punish Christendom for its sins— sins that Church leaders willfully ignored, even en-couraged by allowing absolution to be so cheaply bought.” In this way, the author ties the sale of in-dulgences (i.e., absolution), one of the driving forces of Luther’s work, to crusades against Ottoman Muslims.

This becomes a springboard to examine persistent ideas of “otherness” in European discourse about Muslims, as enemies, adversaries and the objects of fascination to Westerners. Mikhail traces this characterization all the way to the contemporary United States and hysteria over banning sharia law and blocking Muslims from entering the county, thus providing a searing relevance between the early modern world and today.

This is an excellent way to conclude the legacy of the Ottomans and the fear they engendered in Euro-pean observers, yet Mikhail unfortunately misses the opportunity to explain how Orientalism, with its depictions of Muslims and “the East” as inherently illogical, exotic and sinful, was directly related to the existential fears of the Ottomans that he otherwise skillfully describes. It was during the Empire’s later years that the very differences Columbus, Luther and other Europeans decried solidified into the sociological idea that Muslims were uncivilized compared to Europeans and “the West.”

Nevertheless, God’s Shadow is a refreshing corrective to the literary and historical traditions that portray the Ottomans as weak and

inconsequential. Mikhail presents an in-depth, detailed account of this little-understood yet extremely important part of the history of Europe, and the larger world.

Book reviewed by Rose Rankin . The Son of Good Fortune Lysley Tenorio Harper Collins July 2020

“Excel is not a child. The man behind the ticket counter says he looks like one.” So begins the first chapter of Lysley Tenorio’s The Son of Good Fortune, in which 19-year-old Excel is asked to provide legal identification at a Greyhound station, but has none. When the man suggests a license, Excel replies, “If I had a driver’s license, why would I take a bus?” He risks offering an extra five dollars for the ticket without ID, and the man grudgingly accepts, but not before remarking, “Kid, if you’re going to bribe someone, especially at five a.m., aim higher.” Taking the ticket, Excel says, “Thanks, but please don’t call me kid.” This early scene shows Tenorio’s main character both in his element and out of it. As a TNT (short for “tago ng tago,” meaning “hiding and hiding”), Excel has grown up in fear of being identified as undocumented, but he is protective enough of his own worth to politely demand respect.

Along with his lack of citizenship, Excel’s relationship with his mother, Maxima, has closely informed his disposition and decisions. Maxima gave birth to him on a plane traveling from the Philippines to the United States, rendering him neither exactly Filipino nor American. A former B-film action star, Maxima makes a living scamming men she meets online, who seem to generally be white Americans interested in dating or marrying Filipina women. Excel, whose options for stable employment are as limited as his mother’s but who is just as independent and stubborn as Maxima, is at the story’s opening returning from a Southern California desert settlement known as Hello City where he was living with his girlfriend, Sab — a bold experiment in off-the-grid existence that ended in disaster.

As the narrative moves forward, it sifts through both main characters’ histories, uncovering Excel’s experiences in Hello City and Maxima’s reasons for leaving the Philippines. In the present moment, the plot is driven forward by Excel’s urgent need for money, which leads him to beg for his old job back at The Pie Who Loved Me, a spy-themed pizza parlor owned by a former strip club bouncer named Gunter whom Excel insulted upon quitting in an illadvised fit of bravado.

While colorful details like the above may seem to suggest that Tenorio’s novel is primarily meant to entertain (and it is a smooth, pleasurable read) they also paint a sobering picture of working-class existence in the U.S. The trials Excel endures at the pizza parlor, including dressing up as “Sloth the Sleuth” in a show of good faith to Gunter, only to pass out from dehydration inside the sweltering costume and be denied pay as a result, are funny on the surface but also representative of the exploitation endured by many undocumented and otherwise vulnerable workers in a capitalist society. Excel’s job and Maxima’s online schemes are brimming with an absurdity that contradicts the romance of the American dream, showing a reality where the only viable options beyond superhuman achievement are illegal or questionable according to social mores.

This reality has been acknowledged under a romantic spotlight in American crime dramas such as the TV series Breaking Bad, which follows a middle-aged science

teacher who begins dealing methamphetamine in a desperate bid to pay for his cancer treatments. However, society’s most marginalized, including undocumented immigrants more predisposed to desperate circumstances, are not often depicted with such a charming combination of relatability and guile when undertaking understandable criminal actions. In The Son of Good Fortune, Maxima’s cons are not significantly romanticized, but neither is the reader denied the delight of watching her and her son building step by step towards a big joint scam in which they try to take advantage of a wealthy man’s condescending preconceptions about their ethnicity.

Tenorio does not give the impression that Excel and Maxima are neatly justified in their actions, but rather that precise questions of right and wrong must come second to the autonomy they have learned to exercise within a broken world, a legacy passed from mother to son. The novel shows their willingness to make questionable choices that they nevertheless stand behind, stressing that moral purity is a luxury in a system that puts a price on all aspects of humanity. At the same time, it challenges the pervasive popular narrative that encourages racialized immigrants to always “aim higher” and to display exceptional, self-sacrificing behavior. Through sensitive and skillful portrayal of its characters, The Son of Good Fortune puts a joyful spin on their grim circumstances, celebrating their ability to know their value in a society that attempts to erase them.

Reviewed By Elisabeth Cook