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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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