A fresh, accessible take on a rich history; ideal reading for anyone planning a trip to Spain.
The British-born Madrid correspondent for the Guardian offers an enthusiastic history of the country he has called home for 20 years.
A “recently naturalized ‘new’ Spaniard,” Tremlett employs as a unifying theme Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s “four winds” theory to illustrate the fertile mixing of diverse peoples who have swept across the Iberian Peninsula for centuries. As long as those winds have been allowed to blow through—Romans, Visigoths, Moors, and beyond—the country has flourished. However, when the winds have been stifled—e.g., by Isabella and Ferdinand when they expelled the Moors and instigated the Inquisition, or during Franco’s years of totalitarian rule—the country has “withered.” Tremlett is concise yet thorough in his historical journey, which he wisely begins by discussing Spain’s geography. The Iberian Peninsula’s proximity to the coast of Africa and to significant trade hubs in the Mediterranean has dictated much of its geopolitics over the centuries, and the tug of war between the Christian north and Muslim south has resulted in some of Spain’s most treasured cultural legacies. “The always porous frontier across which Muslims and Christians had traded and raided for centuries allowed for the import of cultural riches,” writes the author. “Toledo was awash with ancient manuscripts of the kind that had filled the magnificent libraries of Córdoba, many of which had been smuggled north before or after the city was twice sacked by Berbers in the four years after 1009.” During the early years of the Age of Exploration, Spain became one of the primary European traffickers of enslaved people from the African continent. Following the nation’s golden age of arts and culture, which Tremlett explores in appealing detail, it experienced a protracted period of absolutism, revolution, and civil unrest, culminating in Franco’s dictatorship. The author then brings us up the present, which includes ongoing insurgencies in Catalonia and the Basque Country. The many bright photos are a welcome bonus to the well-researched narrative.
A fresh, accessible take on a rich history; ideal reading for anyone planning a trip to Spain.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63973-057-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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