A lively portrait of the city once called the “Athens of the north”—and for good reason.
As English novelist and journalist Buchan (Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money, 1997, etc.) writes, the Edinburgh of 1745 was “inconvenient, dirty, old-fashioned, alcoholic, quarrelsome, and poor.” Then came the Battle of Culloden Moor, which has been called the last fight of the medieval era, and the de facto annexation of Scotland by England, all of which caused Scotland’s great minds to flock to the city; remake it by draining lochs, building bridges over gullies, and constructing sturdy houses and public buildings; and down a sea of coffee, tea, and whiskey while conjuring up marvelous ideas. In 1755, Diderot and company, Buchan writes, still devoted only “a single contemptuous paragraph” to the whole of Scotland, but only seven years later Voltaire was proclaiming that all the best ideas about everything “from epic poetry to gardening” were coming from the Scottish citadel. What had happened in that short span was nothing short of a Gaelic renaissance, in which philosophers such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, poets such as James MacPherson and Robert Burns, and practical and theoretical scientists such as James Black and James Hutton were crossing disciplinary boundaries, talking with one another, and advancing new learning that quickly spread across the Western world. An Athens it may have been, but these celebrants made of Edinburgh (“a classical town rescued from the frigid by a Gothic town rescued from the grotesque,” Buchan writes in a memorable turn) a kind of Sparta, too, which insisted that commerce and industry were insufficient without virtu. Whatever the case, Buchan makes a good argument for its having been a great place to be. If he’s a little imprecise on how Edinburgh eventually became a vital center of European civilization, he does a nice job of describing daily life among its intellectual set, of charting their ideas, and of evoking days gone by.
A readable companion to Arthur Herman’s like-minded How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2001).Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-055888-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | HISTORY
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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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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
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