JULIA LOVELL
The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 B.C.-2000 A.D.

In 1969, when the Cultural Revolution was in full spate and tension between Russia and China at its height, I watched with incredulity as two small children pulled heavy stones attached to strings along a hu’tung (small lane) in Beijing. The stones, I soon established, came from the partly demolished old city wall, and were being used to build air-raid shelters against Russian bombs. In one form or another, keeping the foreigner at bay has always involved walls, and the Chinese are ingenious about how they use them.

Julia Lovell, a don at Cambridge, has had the idea of telling the story of China over three millennia through the history of the Great Wall. Given her own strictures against the Western predilection for what she calls “wall-worship,” it is a risky endeavor, but Ms. Lovell more than pulls it off in “The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 B.C.-2000 A.D.” (Grove Press, 320 pages, $25). Her account of both its construction and purpose involve a healthy dose of demythologizing.

Someone slipped President Nixon a smarmy line during his famous visit about the Great Wall being built by a Great People, but for the Chinese the associations are less glamorous. It did little to keep out the Mongol hordes in the 13th century, and has more to do with defeat and political collapse than with greatness. (In Chinese it is chang cheng – the long wall.)

On the wall Ms. Lovell’s book is an exercise in historical deconstruction, reminding us that before the first millennium B.C. the Chinese were frequently the aggressors, and challenging the idea, born of China’s indestructible self-esteem, that everyone beyond its northern frontier was an out-and-out barbarian. Even the glories and successes of the T’ang dynasty, much revered in China, were, she argues, often the indirect product of contact with the steppe culture to the north.

Her way of talking about China is attractively independent, avoiding the apologetics and deferential cliches we associate with some sinologues. She makes no bones about the unlovely Chinese traditions of insularity, despotism, and arrogance, whether in the thinking of the Qin dynasty, constructors of the first stage of the wall in the fourth century B.C., in the reception in 1793 of the British emissary Lord Macartney, whose technologically advanced presents were later found in a barn, or in the mind-set of the most determinedly isolationist, most murderous, and (in academia) most frequently deferred to Chinese leader, Chairman Mao.

Ms. Lovell’s brisk, confident style leads her to make statements that might make other historians blink. One is the contention that, contrary to the idea that an increasingly insular China was overtaken by the West around 1500, it remained a great power till around 1800, “when the Industrial Revolution finally propelled the West ahead.” The claim that China was in any sense in the same league as Britain or France in, say, 1750 is a large one, and could have done with more elaboration.

As well as walling them in, Mao used political puritanism and class struggle to raise barriers between his people. Today the regime is constructing a frantic firewall against the Internet, which promises to be as little use in keeping the modern barbarians out as the bricks and mortar version. Meanwhile the cash is flowing freely (and mostly inward) under, over, and around China’s mental wall, and in the end it will be cash that brings it down. Wang qian kan, a 1990s slogan meaning “look to the future,” sounds the same in Chinese as “look to money.”

A combination of the general and the specific, Ms. Lovell’s book works well, both as an introduction to Chinese history and as a study of one of its most evocative aspects.

– George Walden, the Daily Telegraph

WILLIAM J. BROAD
The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Messages of Ancient Delphi

Opposite the frontispiece of New York Times writer William J. Broad’s “The Oracle” (Penguin Press, 336 pages, $25.95), there is a painting by John Collier titled “The Priestess of Delphi,” depicting the Oracle sitting on a tripod, hunched over a fissure on the floor. Her face exhibits an otherworldly look while loops and curls of gas seep up from the chasm. The Oracle, or the Pythia, as she was sometimes known, was, for about 12 centuries, at the center of Greek religion and politics. Her prophecies, said to issue from the navel of the earth, helped shape decisions over matters ranging from the domestic to the civic, from agriculture to warfare.

Was the Oracle a prophet or a charlatan? Or perhaps an intoxicated fool? For centuries, the existence of the gas, or pneuma (“wind,” “breath,” “spirit,” or “soul”), and its role in the Pythia’s rites have been an issue of contention among scholars. In search of the reality behind the myth, Mr. Broad engagingly draws on archaeology, geology, literature, and art history and infuses his book with the fastidious detail and dramatic tension of a mystery novel.

Classical sources such as Plutarch, among others, referred to a sweet-smelling vapor surrounding the Oracle’s chamber, or adyton. Science in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, seemed to cast these sources into doubt; French archaeologists found no fissure at Delphi that might have carried intoxicating fumes into the adyton. This revelation threw the Pythia into discredit – she was viewed either as a cheat or as a fool. But over the past decade, two American academics, geologist Jelle de Boer and archaeologist John Hale, have resurrected the image of the Oracle.

Much of Mr. Broad’s book revolves around the revelatory work of these two “history detectives.” Examining the subject with renewed vigor, they proved that the pneuma was not a fiction or metaphor, but in all likelihood a very real gas, ethylene, that aided the Oracle, and contributed to her prophetic state. Used as an anesthetic in the early 20th century, the gas induces a pleasurable trance and wears off quickly.

In examining the vacillations of the Pythia’s reputation, Mr. Broad meditates upon the politics of science and scholarship, as well as the weight of prevailing opinion. Perhaps what is most remarkable about “The Oracle” is how it moves beyond a mystery of science and becomes a rumination on what questions science can answer and what remains in the domain of religion. If the book is part detective story, then the vapor can be seen as a red herring, an interesting and important aspect of the Oracle, but not the explanation of her true essence.

– Kevin Lam