Top-shelf history offering tremendous acknowledgement of past systemic abuses.
A scathing indictment of the long and brutal history of British imperialism.
Historian Elkins, founding director of Harvard's Center for African Studies and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (2005), frames her narrative with two events that actually took the British Empire to task for its violent imperial policy over centuries. The first was the 1788 impeachment trial of governor-general of India, Warren Hastings, during which Parliament demanded accountability for his repressive tactics, shocking the nation. The second is the 2011 case of the survivors of the Mau Mau rebellion. Throughout this tour de force of historical excavation, Elkins confronts the decidedly Western ideas of the social contract, government responsibility, and the importance of personal property alongside the enduring belief that White men alone could institute these marvelous liberal gifts. “When 19th century liberalism confronted distant places and ‘backward people’ bound by strange religions, hierarchies, and sentimental and dependent relationships, its universalistic claims withered,” writes the author. “Britains viewed their imperial center…as culturally distinct from their empire….Skin color became the mark of difference. Whites were at one end of civilization’s spectrum, Blacks at the other. All of shades of humanity fell somewhere in between.” Paternalistic attitudes continued to evolve across the empire, and Elkins provides especially keen examinations of colonies where clashes were particularly forceful and “legalized lawlessness” was widespread—among other regions, India, South Africa, Palestine, Ireland, Malay, and Kenya. Offering numerous correctives to Whitewashed history, the author mounts potent attacks against the egregious actions of vaunted figures like Winston Churchill; Henry Gurney, commissioner of Malay; and Terence Gavaghan, a colonial officer in Kenya. Over the course of the 20th century, Britain was forced to cede many of its sovereign claims to empire, at enormous human cost. Elkins masterfully encapsulates hundreds of years of history, amply showing how “Britain was to the modern world what the Romans and Greeks were to the ancient one.”
Top-shelf history offering tremendous acknowledgement of past systemic abuses.Pub Date: March 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-307-27242-3
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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 determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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