Bernstein’s decision to filter the broader history of the region through the prism of Hastings’ life results in a narrative...
An odd mix of conversational commentary and detailed historical documentation that presents an account of burgeoning British imperialism in India.
One might wonder how theoretical physicist, mountain climber, and science writer Bernstein (Cranks, Quarks and the Cosmos, 1992, etc.) came to write an 18th-century colonial history. His prologue informs the reader that he stumbled across Hastings’ story while reading regional history in preparation for a trip to (and a subsequent New Yorker story about) mountain climbing in Tibet. Hastings spent most of his life, from his teens on, employed by the British East India Company, rising through its ranks and finally achieving the rank of Governor-General of India. At the pinnacle of his power, he sponsored the development of the first Grammar of the Bengal Language and the first translation into English of the Bhagavadgita. After 12 years as Governor-General, however, he was recalled to Britain in disgrace to face impeachment charges for bribery, corruption, and oppression of the Indian people. The tension generated by these seemingly contradictory historical views of Hastings drives Bernstein’s narrative, which is loaded with excerpts from primary-source documents. The best sections harness these sources to present sparkling and insightful profiles of peripheral figures (such as novelist Fanny Burney). More often, however, these sources strain against the weight of anachronistic colonial and parliamentary contexts. Bernstein’s conversational prose avoids deep analysis of these complex contexts by adopting an apologist’s stance for Hastings—giving the story a novelistic (rather than a historic) feel.
Bernstein’s decision to filter the broader history of the region through the prism of Hastings’ life results in a narrative that lacks objectivity and strains beneath the weight of extensive documentation, but it is still interesting for its entertaining portraits of period figures. (21 b&w photos)Pub Date: May 19, 2000
ISBN: 1-56663-281-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
