A capacious, prodigiously researched biography from a top-shelf historian.
A revisionist portrait of a maligned monarch.
English historian and biographer Roberts, winner of the Wolfson History Prize and many other honors, draws on abundant archival sources to create a deeply textured portrait of George III (1738-1820), whom he calls “the most unfairly traduced sovereign in the long history of the British monarchy.” Countering the characterizations of George as pompous and cruel, promulgated in such plays as Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III and Hamilton, Roberts argues that the king was an intelligent, astute leader, dedicated to upholding the British Constitution. In addition to his passion for the arts and sciences; he was “well-meaning, hard-working, decent, dutiful, moral, cultured and kind.” A shy child, he was by no means backward, although his own mother thought he “was not quick.” Nevertheless, Roberts found that “his exercise books in the Royal Archives show that George was perfectly competent at reading and writing English by the age of nine.” By 15, he could translate classical texts, including philosophy. His father died when he was 12, and his grandfather was cruel and abusive, leading young George to see as his “surrogate father” John Stuart, a handsome, charming man 25 years older, who “introduced George to many of the artistic and intellectual passions of his life, and to the people who stimulated them.” Stuart long served as George’s confidant, adviser, and, briefly, prime minister. Roberts capably traces the complicated machinations that led to George’s selection of Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz as his wife; the roiling politics of 18th-century England; the gossip and power play that threatened his authority; the American colonists’ inevitable break from British rule (nothing to do with taxes, Roberts argues); and five episodes of manic-depressive psychosis—not, as many historians have believed, porphyria. Vividly detailed, the author’s life of George is comfortably situated in the context of British, European, and Colonial history.
A capacious, prodigiously researched biography from a top-shelf historian.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984879-26-4
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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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