An eye-opening safari into the history and psychobiography of African exploration. McLynn (Burton, 1991, etc.) begins with a brightly colored sketch of the European canvassing of Africa, from Mungo Park's quest in the late 1700's for the source of the Niger to the successful penetration nearly a century later of the last blank spots on the map by German, French, and English adventurers. In between came a host of pith-helmeted derring-doers, most notably Burton, Livingstone, Speke, and Stanley. As McLynn sees it, all were driven by demons, from Stanley's sadomasochism to Burton's hatred of blacks to Livingstone's misanthropy. Upon this historical framework, the author builds his most unusual contribution: a thematic, transhistorical analysis of African exploration, covering in depth such topics as transport, the ivory trade, and the influence of imperialism. The impression grows of a nightmare continent of disease, warfare, and slavery into which Europeans brought their own cruelties and manias, at great peril and for little profit. McLynn provides fascinating, little-found information about everything from favored apparel (umbrellas, dark glasses) to porterage styles (because of the tsetse fly, domesticated animals couldn't survive in the African interior, so the human foot became the main means of exploration) to the eating habits of the black mamba. A close scrutiny of a few months in Stanley's 1874-75 transverse of Tanzania provides a case study of typical obstacles faced by the explorers. The blemish on this peach of a book comes at the end, when McLynn attempts—as did Fawn M. Brodie and others before him—to psychoanalyze the great explorers: Talk of mother fixation and other libidinous undercurrents sounds sadly reductionist in the face of these explorers' extraordinary feats. Except for those Freudian shadows, much bright light on the Dark Continent.
Pub Date: May 14, 1993
ISBN: 0-88184-926-X
Page Count: 390
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
Categories: HISTORY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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