Magisterial and timely, given the manifold environmental crises facing the current administration.
An appropriately vigorous and larger-than-life—but also detailed and carefully documented—biography of the visionary president who put so much land and so many resources in the public trust.
Brinkley (History/Rice Univ.; The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, 2006, etc.) makes an important contribution to our understanding of Theodore—never “Teddy” to anyone who knew him, Brinkley cautions—Roosevelt as conservationist and preservationist by providing both a personal and an intellectual genealogy. On the personal side, Roosevelt was descended from Dutch New Yorkers who worked the land and knew its ways. His father was a founding member of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where young Theodore logged considerable time. On the intellectual front, he was an ardent student of animal life. “At a very early age,” Brinkley writes, “Theodore Roosevelt started studying the anatomy of more than 600 species of birds in North America. You might say that his natural affinity for ornithology was part of his metabolism.” Certainly, his active interest in the outdoors and constant sojourns in wild places helped Roosevelt overcome youthful sickliness. Moreover, he became a vocal champion of evolutionary theory, then fairly new. Treading carefully, Brinkley suggests how Roosevelt’s understanding of Darwin’s contributions to biology figured in with his social-Darwinist notions of empire, manifest destiny and the white man’s burden. The author also shows us how, as president, Roosevelt brought so much of the public domain under the strong protection of the federal government, adding millions of acres to the national parks, forests and lands systems. He did this in part by building and working a network of like-minded preservationists. Brinkley highlights the work of long-forgotten congressional allies such as Rep. John F. Lacey of Iowa, who “did more to protect migratory birds than any other politician in American history besides Theodore Roosevelt.”
Magisterial and timely, given the manifold environmental crises facing the current administration.Pub Date: July 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-056528-2
Page Count: 960
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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 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
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