Even so, Stille is an exemplary reporter, and he offers here just the thing to add to a history buff’s stack of bedside...
On deteriorating masterpieces, disintegrating temples, declining Latin, and other markers of the race to save history from humanity.
“Our society is in the midst of a fundamental rupture with the past,” writes New Yorker contributor Stille (Excellent Cadavers, 1995, etc.). This break, he adds, isn’t a result just of the historical amnesia born of a television age but is also a result of disappearing antiquities themselves: our knowledge of the past, of earlier peoples, and even of nature increases exponentially while the objects of study themselves are disappearing, whether to the tomb, the robber’s shovel, or Taliban cannons. Stille’s 11 pieces here, most previously published in the New Yorker, address this loss while looking at varied attempts by individuals (and by a few organizations) to reverse it. The author writes, for example, about American primatologist Patricia Wright, who, “great at politicking,” all but single-handedly created Madagascar’s Ranomafana National Park, a preserve for lemurs and other endangered species; about University of Chicago scholar Mark Lehner, who is laboring against all odds to prevent further destruction of Egypt’s Giza pyramid complex; and, most entertaining of all, about the American expatriate priest Reginald Foster, who has launched a highly influential if idiosyncratic movement to restore Latin to the status of a living language. Individually, the pieces are pleasures, bearing all the hallmarks of New Yorker–style comprehensive yet accessible approach to the weightiest of matters. But they’re not equally successful at adding up to a sustained argument, a weakness revealed clearly in the ill-advised concluding chapter, which attempts to tie it all together with a string of truisms about the deleterious effects of modern habits on things and ways of the past.
Even so, Stille is an exemplary reporter, and he offers here just the thing to add to a history buff’s stack of bedside reading.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-15977-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
In his first nonfiction work, noted Native American novelist Welch (The Indian Lawyer, 1990, etc.) stretches the boundaries of history. With the research assistance of Stekler, Welch offers a sweeping history of the American West based on work the pair did for their 1992 PBS documentary, The Last Stand. Though centered on the Battle of the Little Big Horn, in which warriors led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeated Custer's 7th Cavalry, the volume actually chronicles white/Indian contact and conflict from the voyage of Lewis and Clark in 1804 to the present—from the viewpoint of the Indians. Welch begins by describing the 1869 massacre of a band of his own Blackfeet people and his efforts to locate the forgotten site of the carnage. He then moves on to the story of Custer, a Civil War hero who was demoted following the war and sent to fight Indians on the Western frontier. His conduct at the Washita Massacre, during which he and his men wiped out Black Kettle's peaceful Cheyenne, called his abilities into question and demonstrated the character and leadership flaws that would help bring about his death eight years later. Brash, cavalier, and supremely confident, Custer embodied America's larger self-image. His death, in the worst military disaster of the Indian Wars, thus assumed mythic proportions, aided by a relentless publicity campaign by his widow. Welch traces the fates of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull following the famous battle and uses accounts of such other engagements as Sand Creek and the Fetterman Massacre to help put Little Big Horn in historical perspective. A late chapter personalizes the text, as Welch tells the story of his mother and his early desire to become a writer. An excellent Native version of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: a sad tale that, despite momentary triumphs like Little Big Horn, could not but end tragically for the Indians. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 24, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03657-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Wyatt-Brown (History/Univ. of Florida; Southern Honor, not reviewed, etc.) buries a good idea under an avalanche of scholarly detail. Too much of this study is concerned with the first Percys in America, an interesting but not exceptional bunch of slaveholding frontiersmen led by one ``Don Carlos'' Percy, an apparent bigamist who also seems to have shared the Percy predisposition to melancholia. His other legacies to future Percys were a fondness for Stoicism, Catholicism, conservatism, and an aristocratic sense of honor. Thus Wyatt-Brown's thesis (i.e., ax) to demonstrate (i.e., grind): that generations of Percys are linked by the ethics of chivalry, the tendency to chronic depression, and the predilection for mythmaking. Among the mythmakers were two 19th- century sisters (Wyatt-Brown calls them ``two Southern Brontâs'') who churned out mediocre verse and commonplace gothic fiction. A later relative, Sarah Dorsey, achieved minor fame as a postCivil War romance novelist and major notoriety as the close friend of the married Jefferson Davis, with whom she bemoaned the decline of the South during Reconstruction. Real distinction came in the 20th century with LeRoy Percy, a US senator from Mississippi, who was an ardent foe of the Ku Klux Klan. His son, the poet William Alexander Percy, shared the same sense of noblesse oblige. ``A bachelor with severe inhibitions'' (i.e., a closeted homosexual), Will eventually published Lanterns on the Levee, a classic of the modern South. Walker Percy's grandfather (the senator's brother) and father both committed suicide, but the novelist worked through his existential melancholy, argues Wyatt-Brown, by creating many fine works of fiction. No literary critic, Wyatt-Brown forgets why most readers would pick up this book in the first place. He barely mentions Walker Percy until well over 200 pages into the book, by which time most nonhistorians are likely to have set it aside.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-505626-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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