May 1, 2022
Author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Zealot, religion scholar Aslan resurrects the life of the little-known Howard Baskerville, An American Martyr in Persia who traveled there in the early 1900s, befriending revolutionaries intent on securing democracy and eventually joining them in battle. The Wolfson Prize-winning Figes gives us the history book we need to read now: The Story of Russia, starting with the ancient Rus--Baltic Slavs or Vikings?--and parsing the mythologies that have shaped the country (60,000-copy first printing). Author of the New York Times best-selling "Resistance Quartet," Moorehead offers a portrait of Mussolini's Daughter, who was instrumental in imposing fascism in Italy. A Georgetown professor of history and politics tells the story of his own family, The Sassoons, the Jewish Baghdadi dynasty that built an empire grounded in trade in the 18th through 20th centuries. An award winner in the author's native Spain, Vallejo's Papyrus unearths the fascinating story of books and libraries in the ancient world.
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August 15, 2022
Georgetown University historian Sassoon (Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics) profiles in this grand if somewhat plodding account the branch of the Sassoon family that built a global trading empire after leaving Baghdad for Bombay in the 1820s. Sassoon, whose own branch of the family remained in Baghdad, describes his ancestor Sheikh Sassoon ben Saleh Sassoon’s role as the city’s chief treasurer and the persecution under Ottoman ruler Sultan Mahmud II that forced the Jewish family to flee to India. Sheikh Sassoon’s second eldest son, David, began trading textiles in the 1830s, before expanding the business to include opium and cotton and getting seven of his eight sons involved in running offices of the family firm in England, China, India, Japan, and elsewhere. Success brought assimilation into upper-class society in England—where most of David’s sons and their families had relocated by the end of the 19th century—and complacency about the business; with few family members willing to move to Asia to run it, outsiders took over. Though dense, the narrative is enlivened by portraits of illustrious family members including Farha Sassoon, who successfully ran the Bombay headquarters of the business after her husband’s death in 1894, and WWI poet Siegfried Sassoon. The result is an impressive deep dive into a family that bridged East and West as they built—and lost—an empire.
September 1, 2022
While many readers may know the Rothschild name and its worldwide fame in the banking industry, fewer are familiar with the house of Sassoon, whose influence in Asia shaped world events for centuries. Arising toward the end of the eighteenth century, the family was led by Sheikh Sassoon ben Saleh, who acted as the sultan's treasurer in Baghdad. Scion of this remarkable heritage, historian-author Sassoon (Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics, 2016) traces the family's extraordinary rise in the India of the Raj, where their mercantile abilities merged with the output of the Industrial Revolution to amass great wealth. The Sassoons became vital links in the opium trade and soon had a Shanghai presence as well. They also dealt in cotton and, eventually, oil, and became key players in British politics. Over time, though, the family's genes for success ran out, and the author is unsparing in documenting the family's decline by the start of the twenty-first century. The Sassoon family tree is complicated, and keeping characters straight throughout the narrative can be daunting, particularly since the family repeated names constantly. Luckily, the author helpfully provides a detailed genealogy, along with a bibliography and illustrations.
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August 1, 2022
In his new book, Georgetown Univ. historian Sassoon (Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics) relays in stunning detail the rise of the Sassoons, a Jewish Baghdadi family that became one of the most prominent merchant dynasties of the 19th century. The book spans generations as they grew their empire into one of the world's largest after fleeing Baghdad for India and eventually partnered with the Rothschild banking empire. Beginning with the patriarch, David Sassoon, the family built a global empire heavily reliant on the opium trade but also in commodities, including tea and cotton. Despite being a distant relative to his titular subject, Sassoon maintains a historian's impartiality, revealing, often in minute detail, the main figures who succeeded David and grew the company, blemishes included, and the influence the family had on British policy and issues ranging from tariffs to delaying laws restricting the opium trade. He further shows how they became part of the culture of the British elite through their philanthropic endeavors founding schools, synagogues, and other institutions in India and beyond. VERDICT A meticulously detailed account of the rise and fall of a mercantile dynasty that will appeal to casual history buffs and academics alike.--Bart Everts
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.