A lively account, but lacking in analysis.
Crawford (Thunder on the Right, not reviewed) gives us a rollicking good tale of the downfall of an 18th-century maiden.
On September 16, 1774, Nancy Randolph was born into one of the most powerful families in colonial Virginia. She grew up with all the privileges of the gentry, and all the expectations, too. Considered a great beauty, she had been raised to snag the scion of another good Virginia family—but she sparked the most sordid sexual scandal of the Revolutionary era instead. At 18, she was accused of seducing Richard Randolph, her sister’s husband, and then coercing him into killing the baby she gave birth to nine months later. Richard and Nancy both declared their innocence, claiming that shiftless slaves had invented the story out of whole cloth. Richard admitted he had been most attentive to his pretty sister-in-law, but he denied sleeping with her. He spent a small fortune procuring the services of Patrick (“give me liberty or give me death”) Henry to represent him in court, and he was acquitted—but to no avail: Nancy’s name was mud. Men who had once fought to dance with her haughtily declared that they’d never lay a hand on her again. Now known as the Jezebel of Virginia, she moved north, settling in New York and marrying renowned New York politician Gouverneur Morris. Her son eventually built a church in her honor—St. Ann’s of Morisannia (the parish Jonathan Kozol recently wrote about in Ordinary Resurrections, p. 453). Crawford tells Nancy’s story in fast-paced, page-turning prose, but she fails to explain the lasting significance of this scandal. Is Nancy’s saga just a good yarn, a quaint, 18th-century version of Monicagate? Or is there more here than picturesque entertainment? It’s far from clear.
A lively account, but lacking in analysis.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-83474-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
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
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