Cultural anthropologist Delaney offers an interpretation of Christopher Columbus's career based on the apocalyptical millenarianism she identifies in his thinking.
The author argues that the reconquest of Jerusalem was the passion of Columbus's life and also the purpose of his voyages. Her substantiation is found in works like the Book of Prophesies, produced near the end of his life, his letters to the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI and the comparison of the flow of the Orinoco with the book of Genesis and the hinterland of the Terrestrial Paradise. Delaney believes these kinds of views have been downplayed in consideration of the explorer’s life and work. Focusing on this less-iconic side of Columbus, author casts new light on the policies of the monarchs under whom he worked, first in Portugal and then Spain. His 1492 voyage began on August 2, the day set for Spain's Jews to convert or face execution. The “reconquista” of Al-Andalus from the Moors was considered by Spain's monarchs to be just a step on the road to Jerusalem. As Delaney and others have shown, Columbus was neither open nor truthful about his motives or ultimate plans, so his writings cannot necessarily be taken at face value. His “sail west to go east” strategy failed to find the Indies and their riches and was associated with heterodox cosmological views. As his stories were discredited, he probably had good reason to fear his own monarch's inquisitors. A welcome reappraisal of Columbus and his legacy.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0232-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
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
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