Readers will finish this third in a delightful series of bottom-up histories hoping Mortimer has his sights set on Georgian...
The latest guidebook to England’s past from the renowned historian.
Social historian Mortimer (Human Race: Ten Centuries of Change on Earth, 2015, etc.) is on to a good thing. His previous, similarly structured books, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England (2009) and The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England (2013), charmed readers, and this latest will do the same. As usual, great men and events make only a fleeting appearance because the author is more concerned with everyday lives: in this case, the lives of Britons of all classes between 1660 and 1700. London aside, demographics were dismal. Britain’s population rose steadily from the 1400s until the present day, except during the Restoration, when it declined. Europe was passing through the Little Ice Age; crops often failed, and food prices rose. Britain endured its last famine in the 1690s. All historians stress that their era brought revolutionary changes, and Mortimer is no exception. England executed its last witch in 1685, and Isaac Newton’s Principia, the book marking the dawn of the scientific age, appeared in 1687. Innovations of the time included insurance, journalism, statistics, and modern (as opposed to merchant) banking. Personal checks also made their first appearance. Aware that historical dietary and hygienic habits retain a special fascination, Mortimer does not disappoint. The healthiest food remained meat. Privies were a low priority; a chronic complaint from great houses and even royal palaces was people “leaving their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal houses, cellars.” In the century since the author’s Elizabethan Guide, London’s population had quadrupled to over 400,000, but there were still no sewers or running water. Garbage removal remained in the hands of private entrepreneurs, although a heavy rain worked better.
Readers will finish this third in a delightful series of bottom-up histories hoping Mortimer has his sights set on Georgian England.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-354-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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