A keenly observant, if at times pretentious, exploration of identity politics writ large at the national level. What Lowenthal (Geography/University College, London) calls ``the cult of heritage'' is seen today in historical theme parks; museum and commemorative policy; child adoption; a booming illicit trade in art and antiquities; and most ominously, in xenophobia, racism, and genocide. Frequently heritage involves a national or ethnic trauma that needs to be recalled, such as the Holocaust for the Jews, the Potato Famine for the Irish, and the wars that kept Poland subjugated for years. At times, however, this emphasis sparks a kind of victim politics that brooks no disagreements and can even lead to a cycle of mutual grievances and bloodshed, as in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and the Middle East. Unlike history, Lowenthal notes, heritage makes no attempt at objectivity as it views the past with present-minded purpose. Heritage further deforms the past because it is ``popularized, commoditized and politicized,'' in the form of kitschy theme parks like Disney's aborted Historyland and the more ambitious if still somewhat misleading Williamsburg (where management is still uncertain how fully to depict slavery in this colonial capital). Lowenthal is especially canny about heritage as an all-consuming growth industry, noting that Stonehenge is now protected from predatory tourists by barbed wire. However, he has caught more than the net of his argument can reasonably hold (it's a wide range from essentially liberal curatorial issues to the horrors of genocide), and his prose aims for high-flown rhetoric when a little earthiness might have been helpful. Moreover, he never really shows the reader how to separate the wheat of heritage (its function as ``creative act'') from the chaff (the many faults he describes). Still, a provocative examination of how nations worship at, and are sometimes sacrificed on, the altar of memory.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-82798-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
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
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
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