A quirky but always delightful social history that will convince most readers that social revolutions have been happening...
Most observers agree that the 20th century saw dazzling changes: the automobile, airplane, atom bomb, antibiotics, computers, space travel, the internet, and hundreds of other amazing advancements. What century can match that? Every one since 1000, responds veteran British social historian Mortimer, and he makes a convincing case.
Following his format of The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England (2013), the author rewinds the clock for a fascinating, century-by-century Eurocentric argument that stuff more world-shaking than cellphones has been happening for a millennium. In much of the 11th century, the Holy Roman Emperor had the power to appoint and remove popes. By 1100, the papacy was an elected position, and Christendom dominated Europe. A powerful church supported powerful monarchs, whose armies finally drove off raiding Vikings, Magyars, and Mongols. Violence diminished, the population prospered, and cities expanded. By 1200, medieval Europe was enjoying a renaissance. Famine and plague devastated the continent after 1300, but an even bigger renaissance followed. The humanism movement, which glorified individual achievement, produced an explosion of art and science but also, for the first time, diaries and personal letters. By 1800, almost everyone had enough to eat, in itself a unique development. Mortimer’s chapters on the 19th and 20th centuries are lengthy and familiar but contain a few jolts. The author emphasizes that revolutions have a terrible record in promoting justice. Single-issue crusades—e.g., anti-slavery, women’s rights, civil rights, the eight-hour workday—do much better. Throughout, Mortimer focuses on changes that affected everyone. Thus, the revolution of printing didn’t fully catch on in 1450 with the invention of the printing press (early books were expensive and in Latin) but rather with the avalanche of cheap, vernacular Bibles a century later.
A quirky but always delightful social history that will convince most readers that social revolutions have been happening for a long time.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-243-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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