Mordaunt Crook, historian of British building (U. of London), takes a sociological approach to the houses of rich Victorians and Edwardians who rose to the beau monde without the decided advantages of ancient family lineage (see Trollope, Disraeli, or Ruskin). Wealth earned after the Industrial Revolution made the arriviste a gentleman, the parvenu gentry. (The subject calls for much French.) Forget primogeniture or entailment as keys to status. These newly minted grandees simply built or refurbished country seats, town houses, and shooting boxes on a monumental scale. Columned and crenelated, gaudy Palladian or French style, the huge buildings were massively ugly, and universally scorned by the Establishment. In his catalogue of these heaps, Mordaunt Crook adopts the same attitude, sniffing discreetly at their proprietors as well. Name after name, each linked with house and source of money, passes before the bemused reader. The parade includes millionaire brewers, financiers, and railroaders, as well as the malted milk magnate, the funerary crepe king, the sewing thread tycoon, the guano czar, and the inventor of the sugar cube. As they were at the time, affluent Jews are especially noted, from Barney Barnato to the Sassoons and their ilk. Nor does the roll call neglect the Crawshays of Cyfartha, Sir Algernon Borthwick, or “Walsingham—the man who shot 1,070 grouse in a single day at Blubberhouse Moor in 1888,——together with the rest of Debrett’s, and their clubs, yachts, sporting rituals, and profitable marriages. It would all be very Merchant-Ivory or, more likely, very Gilbert and Sullivan if (despite rare shafts like “Louis Chintz decor” or —blue in tooth and claw”) it weren’t so soporific, especially for Americans who might not be so willing to tut-tut over the excesses of new money. How many, after all, would mind having Bill Gates’ new digs? Sporadically ironic, generally tedious embroidery makes a dull job of a potentially lively subject. (134 b&w photos).
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7195-6040-3
Page Count: 354
Publisher: John Murray Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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