Lost, indeed: Architectural historian Ewing has labored heroically to write the biography of a man whose letters and papers were nearly all consumed in a fire that swept the nascent Smithsonian Institution in 1865.
Undaunted, she pursued bank records, legal documents, professional society archives, diaries and letters from James Smithson’s many correspondents. Smithson (1765–1829) was the illegitimate son of the first Duke of Northumberland; his mother, the Duke’s mistress, could claim also highborn connections and sufficient wealth to enable Smithson’s matriculation at Oxford, his membership in the beau monde, the maintenance of sumptuous bachelor’s quarters in London and an extensive Grand Tour. The tour was not a young man’s pursuit of fun and games (though Smithson did love gambling) so much as a means of meeting the continent’s leading men of science and of adding to his mineral “cabinet.” In the early 1800s, geology, mineralogy and meteorology were the rage, and chemistry was becoming a true science. Smithson, already the youngest member ever admitted to the Royal Society (in 1787), published some papers but mostly enjoyed the company of such leading lights as Priestley, Lavoiser, Cuvier and Davy. He and his circle shared a sense of optimism and progress that led them to admire the Americans’ War of Independence and support the French Revolution. Rough moments in the political aftermath, however, led to Smithson’s imprisonment in Denmark, a country then at war with England. Eventually resettled in London, the lifelong bachelor wrote a will that left his fortune “to found at Washington . . . an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” That the will survived the courts as well as a contentious Congress is in itself an amazing tale—and it might never have happened, Ewing avers, had it not been one man’s heartfelt desire to perpetuate a name that marked him as illegitimate.
Absorbing social history, if not quite a flesh-and-blood story.Pub Date: April 3, 2007
ISBN: 1-59691-029-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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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