Short, occasional pieces that are best ingested in small bites. Cannadine, professor of history and director of the Institute of Historical Research at London University, is one of the foremost historians of modern Britain. His Decline and Fall of the British Monarchy and Aspects of Aristocracy prove him to be a sharp analyst of those anachronistic institutions. Because of his chosen subject matter, his work often has overtones of twilight and nostalgia with just a shadow of decadence (in the British sense) thrown in for good measure. This collection of short pieces is no different, except that it focuses on personalities rather than institutions. It is, in the words of the author, an “unavoidably and unapologetically festive and high-spirited book.” The essays—all composed over the last decade—were originally for such publications as the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, the New Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement. They are loosely grouped into three sections, “Royals in Toils,” “Hindsight’s Insights,” and “Persons and Personalities.” Their greatest strength lies in Cannadine’s insistence that even the most current events (e.g., the death of Princess Diana) must be seen through the prism of history. Far more insightful than the usual essay, yet mercifully brief, they are history lessons with a light touch. From the monarchy to suicide to intellectuals and class, the British sense of style, decorum (or lack thereof), and form constantly remind the reader why the British consider themselves aloof from the “Continent.” American readers will be interested in Cannadine’s pairing of Thatcher-Major with Bush-Clinton, but will perhaps be left a bit adrift on the discussions of the historian A.J.P. Taylor or Lord Beaverbrook. Some attempt at tying these many threads together would have been helpful, and the title is just slightly pretentious, sounding like an echo of Winston Churchill. Entertaining and enlightening.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-300-07702-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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