Thoroughly researched, grim, grisly, and sometimes even grudgingly admiring.
A prolific historian, biographer, and journalist returns with a sanguinary and thorough account of “the greatest conqueror the world has ever known.”
McLynn (Captain Cook: Master of the Seas, 2011, etc.) knows the terrain and the times so well that he writes about 12th- and 13th-century history and culture as if it were yesterday. Throughout this intricately detailed text, the author pauses continually to explain relevant devices, personalities, political situations, and geography—all of this gives readers a chance to truly understand. (The author even includes a lengthy appendix on Mongol religion, which was “extraordinarily complex,” as well as an immensely helpful “glossary of principal personalities.”) McLynn recognizes that the historical sources must be constantly questioned and analyzed, as victors tend to inflate their victories and losers, to minimize and blame. The author begins with the geography of Mongolia. He then tells us what we know about the boyhood of Temujin (who would become Genghis Khan) and charts his rise as a warlord to the position of absolute leader. McLynn provides plenty of material about Mongol battlefield strategy and tactics (they loved the false retreat and the divide-and-conquer ploy; they valued swiftness and were masters of horsemanship) as well as gruesome details about the fates of their enemies. As the author describes repeatedly, the Mongols treated settlements that surrendered without resistance much more humanely than they did those that resisted. Resistance meant absolute slaughter—men, women, children—after, of course, an extended period of looting and raping. The killing was vicious; some warriors even slit open the bodies of pregnant women and removed their unborn. McLynn estimates that the Mongols killed millions of people in their ventures into China, Russia, Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere.
Thoroughly researched, grim, grisly, and sometimes even grudgingly admiring.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-306-82395-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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