An eye-opening and highly readable picture of London’s reactions to the killer fog that has characterized it for centuries.
Most readers would doubt that an entire book about fog could be interesting, but Corton, in her first publication, presents an intriguing biography of the weather effect that defined a national character.
We tend to think of life in a pea-souper, or “London particular,” as filled with romantic trysts or dastardly attacks à la Jack the Ripper. What the author really drives home is the deadliness of the winter fogs, during which, over the course of London’s history, countless coal fires burned in the city’s hearths. Homes as well as industries burned soft bituminous coal from Newcastle, one of the dirtiest fuels. The thickness of the fog even led to hundreds of choking deaths. One couldn’t see to walk, horses couldn’t see to carry passengers, and theaters closed because the audiences couldn’t see the performances. One didn’t open a window for ventilation because it would allow the soot into the house. Corton explains the windless London Basin, which has always gathered moisture, the temperature inversions that trapped it, and the makeup of the yellow, sulfurous killer. The author discusses whether it’s smoke or fog, a problem solved by the introduction of the term “smog,” and painters, writers, and other artists become a large part of the narrative. Dickens used fog as a metaphor for London, while Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde used the fog as a cloak for moral degeneracy. Painters found that fog distorted form and perspective, but the impressionists relished it. Monet loved the fog, and Whistler made it his specialty. Oscar Wilde’s quip shows the general attitude to fog: “where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold.” The author also chronicles unsuccessful attempts to clear the air, with industry fighting it and Londoners fearing the loss of their home fires.
An eye-opening and highly readable picture of London’s reactions to the killer fog that has characterized it for centuries.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-674-08835-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
