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The Blood of the Isles | 
 enlarge | Author: Bryan Sykes
Publisher: Bantam Press
Category: Book
List Price: £17.99
Buy New: £11.29
You Save: £6.70 (37%)
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Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 26654
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 306
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6 x 1.4
ISBN: 0593056523
EAN: 9780593056523
ASIN: 0593056523
Publication Date: September 12, 2006
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 Cynical, anti-English and Wrong August 18, 2008
Angeln
2 out of 10 found this review helpful
To question the delusion of a 'celtic' identity these days is to risk attracting not just criticism but, as even humble academic writers have found to their cost, death threats.
With huge incomes to support and vast armies of porridge-brained fashionistas yearning to discover an oirish ancestor or two (akin to what seems to be an exponential rise in the number of desperate U.S. whites claiming 'native American' blood) this is unsurprising.
Fortunately for the industry academics aren't very brave, and untold riches await those willing to play along, thus tending to a 'consensus' guaranteeing even greater unpopularity for critical reviews such as this.
Blood of the Isles' pressing theme is to unite almost everyone who ever lived in this neck of the European woods under the banner of 'celt'. I reject this idea, and I must therefore risk the displeasure of 'celts' the world over by taking the book - and Mr Sykes, 'the world's first genetic archaelogist' - with a generous pinch of salt.
Bad enough the politically correct nomenclature. But even before that there's the title: wistful, romantic, cynically contrived to lead readers misty-eyed toward the check-out feeling a poem coming on.
'Celtic of any sort,' observed J.R.R. Tolkein, is 'a magic bag, in which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come.' Yet here again we have a 'serious' academic, one eye on sales, peddling outworn drivel dressed up as science.
Dan Bradley, irishman and genetics lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin, is similarly exasperated. Bradley says the most extensive study yet undertaken leaves no doubt that people in areas traditionally known as celtic, such as ireland, wales, scotland, Brittany and Cornwall, have more in common with people from the Iberian peninsula. Only the English have direct genetic links to mainland Europe (Germany, Denmark).
As one report put it, 'We're not celts - we're Galicians!' THERE WERE NO 'CELTS' IN THESE ISLANDS. Even the word is made up. Not that any of that bothers commercially driven academics like Sykes. Apologizing as he does in the book - how like a modern Englishman - for everything from the holocaust to the wicked Saxon plan to annihilate their 'celtic' neighbours merely add weight to a sense of the commercial priorities at work.
Sykes is correct in one sense. He just gets the wrong era. Evidence confirms that genes from about 200,000 Anglo-Saxon immigrants supplanted almost completely those of 'native' Britons ten times their number. And they did it to plan, through strictly enforced apartheid.
Our ancestors brought their own women. Tribally different they nevertheless spoke similar dialects. The paucity of 'celtic' loan words in English, or in place-naming, is proof enough of this insularity, of a profound transformation wrought by the presence of these invaders, just as it is affirms our German heritage.
Culture warriors deliberately mis-label what is actually German - the famous 'celtic cross', to take one example. As to the 'British' they were progressively confined to Wales after the invasion, where they remain. Within just 15 generations, according to a recent London University study, Anglo-Saxon genes accounted for more than half the male DNA in the population of what is now England. It went on, 'In the modern population the DNA is even more heavily Germanic in origin.' Up yours Channel 4.
Sykes is correct to identify a common ancestry. It just isn't 'celtic'. Scythian is one possibility, though all remain arguable. It is the author's anti-English tone, adopted presumably to curry favour with the 'celtic' lobby here and in America, which raises suspicions.
On page 278 Sykes warns a trifle condescendingly, "However we may feel about each other the Irish, the Welsh, and the Scots know (that we share a 'celtic' past), but the English sometimes think otherwise. But, just a little way beneath the surface, the strands of ancestry weave us all togetheras the children of a common past. . . . It is our own genetic ancestry that is the most important. It is the thread that goes back to our own deep roots that means the most".
Nonsense. Whatever the irish, welsh and scots 'know' it most certainly isn't that they are 'celtic'. What they know, the boyos, or pretend to, or have learnt, is how to identify themselves in opposition to a neighbour they envy and hate. 'Celtic' identity is - always was - political, a mythopoeic aspect of regional, primarily irish, revivalism, of which an all too disreputable feature these days sees distinct, singular cultures appropriated into a single timeline in order to 'prove' longevity.
Ireland's southern population, for example, did not arrive until the 2nd century AD. That recent histories fail to reflect this merely exemplifies a political agenda at work in which 'research' establishes a prior moral claim to these islands in opposition to the English.
Sykes writes for tourists. Proof positive of Dr Johnson's dictum that 'no-one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money' this is a hack publication - populist, easy to read, and in its pandering to fashionable prejudice about as valuable.
We are told people distrust science these days. I do hope so. Pretensions to objectivity alone sustain science's mesmeric hold on the public imagination. What the average citizen fails to spot is the brazen politicking the ideology helps to conceal.
Remember dumping fridges because CFCs were destroying the ozone layer? I never quite knew how since CFCs are about eight times heavier than air (note: CFCs can rise under certain conditions, depending which compounds you're measuring, but the predicted chlorine monoxide chain reaction set to destroy 20-40% of the ozone layer is purely the speculation of two scientists with no experience in stratospheric chemistry. What's more the ozone data, which goes back to before the last war, has been selected from a peak reached in 1969 in order to 'prove' a decline).
Remember too the 'imminent' ice age of twenty years ago, which has now given way to global warming, or the hysteria surrounding second-hand tobacco smoke, privately accepted as harmless by medical authorities everywhere since the 1950s?
Maybe you prefer the 'out of Africa' theory of human origins? Imagine how many research grants depend on singing from that particular multiculturalist hymn sheet. Of course if Eskimos go back way before Europeans like they say I'm going to look a fool when all those sub-zero temperatures turn asiatics into white people.
Sykes understands our inclination to go 'baaaah' when told things we like to hear. He knows that with our critical faculties atrophied after years of TV we can't tell our backsides from a pork chop any more. I just wish he hadn't cleaned up at my expense. English people who share my point of view should actively discourage their compatriots from lining the pockets of an enemy.
 Thin, rushed, poorly presented January 2, 2008
historryfann (Florida)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
I expected much better of this book having read Syke's previous "Seven Daughters of Eve." I read Sykes because he's a famed geneticist, but he pads most of the book with straight chapters on British history that any 3rd rate historian could have penned. When it comes to the meat of the issue, the DNA of Britain, he hedges and dumbs down so much that you suspect he's not confident at all of his findings. One frustratingly obvious example is when he labels a particular strain of male Y- chromosome DNA "Wodan" and never explains what it is. You assume it's a reference to a Germanic strain, but Sykes doesn't bother to tell us through 200-plus pages. His information is so annoyingly sketchy and incomplete I suspect he rushed the book into print to satisfy the advertising needs of his DNA testing business. Overall, the biggest frustration with Sykes' work is his refusal to explain with satisfaction why, if we all descend from people who lived in southern Europe during the last ice age, how he can distinguish "Celtic" DNA from "Anglo-Saxon" DNA in Britain. Couldn't the Paleolithic clan have migrated to Germany, and then later to Britain? If so, how can he say who's Celtic and who's Anglo Saxon. A mess of a book. Just read Norman Davies "The Isles" and consider yourself lucky.
Blood Transfusion Needed July 12, 2007
Silurix (London)
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
Popular science writing does not have to be dumb. Steve Jones , Richard Dawkins ,
Matt Ridley, Richard Fortey and others can tackle technical/scientific subjects and still
produce something enjoyable to the general reader without sacrificing all the scientific "meat".
This book , although enjoyable , is thin stuff compared to the output of the above writers.
Sykes is perfectly entitled to produce a "Blue Peter" version of a fascinating topic but I
can't help thinking that a chance has been missed. As others have noted , the rampant egotism
and commercialism further taints the appreciation of what might have been a feast. Mr Sykes
should not patronise the reading public by assuming that the addition of cosy anecdotes and
mythological waffle will compensate for the absence of real substance.
An interesting read, but "dumbed-down" too far May 17, 2007
Rhion Pritchard
17 out of 17 found this review helpful
Bryan Sykes gives the story of his travels around the Isles collecting samples, with many interesting anecdotes along the way. In the last few pages he gives his views on the meaning of the results. The problem is that he does not give enough detail on what those results actually were for the reader to form an opinion on the reliability of his conclusions.
Several comments in the book indicate that Sykes was very keen not to make the book too technical for the general reader. A laudable aim, but the secret of a good popular science book is to make the science comprehensible and interesting to readers without a scientific background - not to leave out the science. There is a reference to a web site where the details can be found, but they should have been in the book.
 Fascinating popular science for history buffs March 7, 2007
fieduffy (Bolton, Lancs, UK)
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
This is a fascinating investigation into the maternal and paternal DNA of the British, comparing historical accounts and myths to the evidence of DNA samples taken from the modern population.
Much as I enjoy non-fiction I sometimes struggle to read it - not so with this book. In places it reads at thriller pace. It's popular science at its best; anyone who enjoyed Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" will like this too, particularly if ancient history, family history or myths interest you - along with a smidgin of biology!
A thought-provoking companion to genealogical research.
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