As Lynskey somberly concludes in this fascinating literary history, Nineteen Eighty-Four’s 70th anniversary “falls at a dark...
The life and afterlife of the celebrated—and seemingly evergreen—novel.
Music, film, and politics writer Lynskey (33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day, 2011) reminds us that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has been the book “we turn to when truth is mutilated, language is distorted, power is abused, and we want to know how bad things can get.” The “fact that the novel speaks to us so loudly and clearly in 2019,” he writes, is a “terrible indictment of politicians and citizens alike.” The author tells his vibrant, spirited story of a man and his book in two parts. He first recounts how Orwell came to write the novel and describes in detail the world he inhabited. In the second section, he follows the “political and cultural life” of Nineteen Eighty-Four, originally titled The Last Man in Europe, from “Orwell’s death to the present day.” Lynskey does a superb job analyzing the young Orwell’s political beliefs, his hatred for fascism, and his “vision of common-sense radicalism.” He had a special admiration for Charles Dickens, whom he described as “generously angry.” Lynskey traces Orwell’s early influences, from H.G. Wells, who “loomed over Orwell’s childhood like a planet,” to Jack London and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “anti-utopian novel We.” Arthur Koestler’s “masterpiece,” Darkness at Noon, provided Orwell with Nineteen Eighty-Four’s “mental landscape.” Though never a wealthy man, Orwell found success with Animal Farm, which provided him with the funds to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he edited continuously for three years while he was quite ill. It published in June 1949; Orwell died 227 days later. Lynskey next traces the novel’s impact, from the Cold War era to today, on politics and other writers; film and play versions; contemporary music and TV shows; and the “most celebrated television commercial” of the 1980s, Apple’s Macintosh computer launch.
As Lynskey somberly concludes in this fascinating literary history, Nineteen Eighty-Four’s 70th anniversary “falls at a dark time for liberal democracy.”Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54405-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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