Former Reuters journalist Gabriel (The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone, 2002, etc.) offers a rich, humanizing portrait of the Marx family.
The author strives mightily—and largely succeeds—in maintaining balance and perspective in her view of Karl and Jenny Marx and their family, long demonized by the Right and sanctified by the Left. Gabriel begins in 1851; the exiled Marxes were in London, enduring penury and near starvation as Karl struggled to do the research and writing that would later culminate in Das Kapital, the multi-volume work completed by his longtime friend, collaborator and patron, Friedrich Engels. Gabriel writes most enthusiastically about Marx’s wife, Jenny, a brilliant and lovely woman from a moneyed family who married Marx, uncomplainingly endured their decades of poverty, never lost faith in the significance of her husband and his work, delivered his children (some of whom died in childhood) and lived to see his work begin to achieve the recognition she had always believed it deserved. The author relies heavily on the massive Marx family correspondence to help her bring to life these most remarkable people. The three daughters who survived into adulthood were all highly intelligent, accomplished and unlucky in love. The author can barely restrain her disdain for Edward Aveling, the philandering (married) man who persuaded young Eleanor Marx to live with him, then betrayed and abandoned her. Her suicide followed not long after. Later, her older sister Laura would also took her own life. Gabriel gracefully achieves an impressive, challenging agenda: the joint biographies of the Marxes (parents, daughters), the career of Engels, the rise of socialism and organized labor, the theoretical background of Marxian economics and politics and the historical and economic contexts for all. A saga as richly realized as a fine Victorian novel.
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-06611-2
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
