 |
|
| Thomas Cahill | |
Thomas Cahill, "a multilingual scholar who wrote a surprise 1995 bestseller demonstrating to the world how a small band of Irish monks collected and protected the jewels of Western civilization after the fall of the Western Roman Empire," died October 18, the New York Times reported. He was 82. Although How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe was not Cahill's first book, it "immediately established his reputation as one of the country's great writers of popular history."
Five publishers rejected Cahill's proposal before Doubleday editor Nan A. Talese acquired it in 1991. "To many would-be publishers, the title sounded like a bunch of blarney--even in the early 1990s, many people still considered Ireland a conservative backwater and a cultural appendage to Britain," the Times noted, adding that the near-simultaneous appearance of Cahill's book and Frank McCourt's bestselling memoir Angela's Ashes (1996) "was a coincidence, but their immediate and lasting popularity certainly was not."
"That's such a hard thing to do, to bring scholarship alive to the general reader," said historian Terry Golway. "There are people who write popular history and there are people who write academic history, and he was able to do both in ways that were extraordinary."
Intending the book to be the first in a seven-part series--called the "Hinges of History"--about critical moments in Western European civilization, Cahill wrote six of them before his death, including The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (1998); Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (1999); Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003); Mysteries of the Middle Ages: And the Beginning of the Modern World (2006); and Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World (2013).
Early in his career, Cahill taught at several institutions in the New York area, including Queens College and Seton Hall University. He and his wife, Susan Cahill, opened a mail-order book company, and he worked as the advertising director at the New York Review of Books.
In 1990, he became director of religious publishing at Doubleday. He began pitching the Hinges of History series and How the Irish Saved Civilization around the same time. At a sales conference, he mentioned the idea to Talese, who immediately bought the series. It would occupy the remainder of his career, though Cahill took time off in 2002 to publish a short biography of Pope John XXIII as well as A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green (2009).
"What academic writers forget is that everyone on Earth buys books for diversion, or entertainment," he said in 2006. "Yes, they want to learn things, but they also don't want to be bored to death while they learn those things."