A stiff, workmanlike approach to the life of a noble figure.
Dense, encyclopedic biography of world-renowned intrepid proponent for Italian social justice.
A “strong and independent” boy born into a coastal trading family on July 4, 1807, in Nice, Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) rejected his parents’ efforts to steer him toward the more distinguished career paths of a doctor or attorney and quickly learned the ranks of his father’s maritime livelihood (and officially set sail as an apprentice seaman) in his teens. Soon, though, his demanding work at sea was replaced with a heady interest in political activism, most notably with the Italian unification movement “Young Italy,” which was spearheaded by liberal reformist Giuseppe Mazzini, who would emerge as Garibaldi’s mentor. He abandoned a stint in the Sardinian navy in favor of a poorly organized insurrection and ended up in Brazil in 1835. This proved to be just the beginning of many causes the patriotic libertarian would become embroiled in; freeing people from the binds of tyranny and oppression became his life’s work. After engaging in land- and water-based warfare against the Brazilians, Garibaldi met his first wife, Anita, who bore him a son, Domenico, who also joined him on his missions. Adopting guerrilla warfare tactics both on land and at sea, he became a leader and hero in his continued support of exiles and emigrants in Montevideo, Uruguay, and in Italy, where he fought against the Austrians to defend the Roman Republic. After being exiled, he spent time in Tangiers, the United States and England, and moved on to fight in a resistance against a new French Republic. A serious injury prevented him from becoming a major general in the American Civil War’s Union Army, but a burgeoning writing career produced four novels and his memoirs. Scirocco frequently refers to Garibaldi’s autobiographical “memoirs” for direction within the narrative, but he depicts many events with a hazy, cautious speculation since dates and activities remain unclear even in Garibaldi’s own text. Still, the author does a serviceable job of commingling relevant historical factoids with the extraordinary life of this unwavering “quintessential hero.”
A stiff, workmanlike approach to the life of a noble figure.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-691-11540-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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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