An impassioned, big-picture primer ideal for college students.
The great ideas and personalities of the Enlightenment condensed and compressed for accessible consumption.
The unleashing of the human mind from orthodoxy ushered in one of the most exciting periods in history, and consummate historian Burns (Emeritus, Government/Williams Coll.; Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court, 2009, etc.) proves a lively guide to the great currents of Enlightenment thought, from the justification of civil society by the gloomy theorist Thomas Hobbes to the clash over slavery and abolition in America’s Civil War. As announced by Martin Luther’s nailing of his Theses to the Wittenberg church door in 1517, the mind of man was the measure of all things, and only through rigorous empirical tests could ideas be tried and accepted. The received teachings of the medieval church were discarded in favor of “natural philosophy,” and men, although brutish, according to Hobbes, were governed by reason and “motivated to join together in a social compact by fear and the desire for self-preservation.” From Descartes, Spinoza and Locke, among numerous others, ideas of liberty, free thought and speech, religious toleration, and the ability of each individual to transform himself through environment, education and experience shook the “fixity and fatalism” of the Old World, unloosening the bedrock of absolutism and playing out successively in the English civil war, the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Burns maneuvers gracefully through these cataclysmic events, weaving in minibiographies of the notables and significant currents like the Scottish national school system, which gave rise to the stunning contributions of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith. Happiness, property, reform, universal suffrage: The author traces these key concepts to our own era, still worthy of fighting for, as evidenced by the recent events of the Arab Spring.
An impassioned, big-picture primer ideal for college students.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02489-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
HISTORY | MODERN | UNITED STATES | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
A welcome addition to the literature on immigration told by an author who understands the issue like few others.
The debut book from “one of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard.”
In addition to delivering memorable portraits of undocumented immigrants residing precariously on Staten Island and in Miami, Cleveland, Flint, and New Haven, Cornejo Villavicencio, now enrolled in the American Studies doctorate program at Yale, shares her own Ecuadorian family story (she came to the U.S. at age 5) and her anger at the exploitation of hardworking immigrants in the U.S. Because the author fully comprehends the perils of undocumented immigrants speaking to journalist, she wisely built trust slowly with her subjects. Her own undocumented status helped the cause, as did her Spanish fluency. Still, she protects those who talked to her by changing their names and other personal information. Consequently, readers must trust implicitly that the author doesn’t invent or embellish. But as she notes, “this book is not a traditional nonfiction book….I took notes by hand during interviews and after the book was finished, I destroyed those notes.” Recounting her travels to the sites where undocumented women, men, and children struggle to live above the poverty line, she reports her findings in compelling, often heart-wrenching vignettes. Cornejo Villavicencio clearly shows how employers often cheat day laborers out of hard-earned wages, and policymakers and law enforcement agents exist primarily to harm rather than assist immigrants who look and speak differently. Often, cruelty arrives not only in economic terms, but also via verbal slurs and even violence. Throughout the narrative, the author explores her own psychological struggles, including her relationships with her parents, who are considered “illegal” in the nation where they have worked hard and tried to become model residents. In some of the most deeply revealing passages, Cornejo Villavicencio chronicles her struggles reconciling her desire to help undocumented children with the knowledge that she does not want "kids of my own." Ultimately, the author’s candor about herself removes worries about the credibility of her stories.
A welcome addition to the literature on immigration told by an author who understands the issue like few others.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-399-59268-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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