Readers will chuckle at this well-presented avalanche of nonsense, but squirm to realize that our leaders, media,...
Not a biography but a frothy history of the many energetic, often wacky efforts to turn George Washington into a godlike national icon whose life provides lessons in moral uplift.
Few deny that Washington did not cut down the cherry tree or throw a dollar across the Potomac, but historian Lengel (This Glorious Struggle: George Washington’s Revolutionary War Letters, 2008, etc.), editor in chief of the Washington Papers project, points out that a PBS documentary examined his indignant refusal to make himself king in 1783 after leading the Continental Army to victory—an event that also never happened. The author stresses that every generation invents a Washington that agrees with its beliefs. Soon after his 1799 death, writers (including Parson Weems, of cherry-tree fame) produced a classical Washington—restrained, solemn and honorable. Victorian times required a romantic figure, passionately pursuing women as he agonized over his nation’s fate, regularly appealing to God for guidance. Twentieth-century materialism converted him into a cold-hearted businessman, but a resurgence of nationalistic patriotism after Ronald Reagan’s election revived the old-school father figure. Good 18th-century rationalists, our founding fathers were not notably pious, Washington included. However, by the following century this became unacceptable, and Lengel devotes a fascinating section to the torrent of sermons, invented quotations, anecdotes (everyone seemed to stumble upon Washington kneeling in prayer) and even a forged prayer diary designed to illustrate his evangelical Christian fervor. That these are fiction has not discouraged today’s political leaders, religious and conservative websites, TV commentators and documentaries from presenting them as truth.
Readers will chuckle at this well-presented avalanche of nonsense, but squirm to realize that our leaders, media, journalists and even historians regularly accept it.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-166258-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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