An academic correction of the “triumphalist” notion of British exploration of Africa and Australia.
Kennedy (History and International Affairs/George Washington Univ.) sorts through a far more complicated and messy history of 19th-century British exploration than the record has assumed, taking into account much failure as well as a deep reliance on indigenous help. The author asserts that the first British explorers of Australia and Africa looked to the vast continents much as the seafaring explorers had regarded the sea before them, as great unknown oceans, blank spaces to be “measured, mapped, quantified, classified, catalogued, and compared.” Kennedy sees in this epistemological process a form of “erasure” in order to impose upon the unknown continents a “maritime model” such as was employed by Capt. James Cook. Verification required eyewitness accounts scrupulously backed up by scientific method, such as demonstrated in James Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790) and Alexander von Humboldt’s inspiring field research work through Spanish America. A network of organizations (and accompanying armchair geographers) emerged to sponsor and criticize the scientific enterprise, such as the African Association founded by Joseph Banks. Besides accounts by well-known explorers like David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley and John Hanning Speke, Kennedy also looks at travels to Africa by women—e.g., May French Sheldon and Mary Kingsley—and sifts through the explorers’ methodology, shifting logistics depending on circumstances and setbacks, and reliance on indigenous guides. Moreover, Kennedy teases out a fascinating comparative study of Australian versus African exploration that takes into account the early British settlers’ colonies in the former and the richly entrenched indigenous societies and forbidding disease environment in the latter.
A wealth of research for the armchair traveler and historian.Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-674-04847-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | EXPEDITIONS | HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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