A lively, witty whirlwind tour of a calamitous century when Europe and so much of the rest of the world was up in arms, from Polish historian and biographer Zamoyski (Chopin, not reviewed).
To call this maxi-history shallow seems unfair: Zamoyski’s piquant, frequently hilarious descriptions of the numerous idiots, frauds, warmongers, and hypocrites who have been lionized as 19th-century heroes zips along at roughly 50 pages per 10 years. What hobbles so much erudite razzle-dazzle is the breadth of Zamoyski’s challenge: an attempt to unify every act of political rebellion, philosophical upheaval, and cultural convulsion throughout the western world—from Poland to Haiti, from Paoli’s 1755 Corsican rebellion (misinterpreted by Rousseau as a rejection of civilization and a return to a pastoral state of “nature” when it was, in fact, precisely the opposite) to the fall of the Paris Commune. The author shows that, stripped of its mysticism and dreamy idealism, romanticism and patriotism were irrational transfers of what had previously been religious ideas about individual salvation and the divine rights of kings into myths of the noble savage and the savagely noble nation. Typically symbolized by a muscular, bosomy woman in flowing robes, Lady Liberty was no Miss Congeniality. In Poland, Spain, South America, and France, she was no better at defining freedom, defending her borders, nurturing culture, regulating trade, and managing her economic resources than the nasty old kings she replaced. In a tone that slips merrily from the darkly sarcastic to the unimpeachably wise, Zamoyski’s pursuit of unhappiness hops about capriciously, frequently changing locations, time periods, and personalities in a single paragraph. The result strongly debunks past and current notions of 19th-century freedom fighting.
Brash, breezy, and subversively irreverent: Zamoyski makes sausage out of Lafayette, Rousseau, Marx, Bolivar, and other sacred cows—exposing patriotism, romanticism, and the host of other -isms born in their time as dangerous deceptions that are not to die for. (50 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-89271-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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