Diverse character studies that give a broad view of the sweeping economic revolutions of the era.
Popular history of the economy of the Civil War era, a transformative time on the commercial/financial as much as the military fronts.
The usual picture of homefront conditions during the Civil War is a grim time of illness, cold, and hunger. From the Southern side, that’s not off the mark, but as Wert (A Glorious Army: Robert E. Lee’s Triumph, 1862-1863, 2011, etc.) records, the Northern economy boomed, the result of decades of investment and industrialization during which the South relied on slave-based agriculture. So it was that “private gunmakers in just one Connecticut county produced more firearms than gunsmiths in the entire slaveholding South,” good cause for William Tecumseh Sherman to warn secessionists that they would be overwhelmed by “one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth.” The economic strength of the North was fueled by inventors, financiers, and industrialists, nearly 20 of whom Wert profiles here. Readers will have heard of many of them, if only because their names endure in companies that have descended from them: John Deere, for instance, whose Illinois blacksmith shop took advantage of immigrant labor and the nearby Mississippi River to mass-produce a plow that, along with Cyrus McCormick’s reaper, enabled large-scale agriculture. Other familiar names carry stories that are sometimes more puzzling than inspirational: Gail Borden, for example, who tried to promote a “meat biscuit” in the place of Army rations but failed abjectly, since it “was simply not palatable,” only to thrive by selling condensed milk to the federal commissary. Wert glances over some key moments: for instance, the abolitionist sympathies of the Californians who would become transcontinental railroad barons, thwarting Jefferson Davis’ push to take that railroad first across the South. Still, he turns up some fine nuggets, such as repeating-rifle inventor Christopher Spencer’s failure to keep his fortune, consoling himself with the deathbed thought that “the best I can say is I don’t think I am leaving any enemies.”
Diverse character studies that give a broad view of the sweeping economic revolutions of the era.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-306-82512-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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
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
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