A scattered, unpretentious introduction to figures readers may be tempted to investigate further.
A gossipy history zooms in on six women who broke society's rules for their own ends.
The choice of subjects by Scott (Coke: The Biography, 2013, etc.) is eclectic at best and puzzling at worst. Disregarding chronology, he bounces freely through history, awarding some of his subjects a couple of chapters and others a single one, seemingly arbitrarily. The volume opens with Victoria Woodhull, a spiritualist and advocate of free love who announced her run for the presidency of the United States in the 19th century, long before women got the vote. The author then jumps back to the 18th century for a couple dozen pages on Mary Wollstonecraft, best known as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. In a chapter entitled “Holy-Rolling in Carmel Love Nest,” Scott moves on to the early-20th-century life of controversial and wildly popular preacher Aimee Semple McPherson. Coco Chanel and Edwina Mountbatten, wife to the last viceroy of India, also come in for scrutiny. Most perplexing is Scott’s inclusion of Margaret Argyll, whose sole claim to fame seems to be that she was at the center of a divorce that kept the British tabloids busy in the 1960s. The author’s technique is to compile the work of earlier biographers into a brisk, conversational survey of each subject's life, with occasional asides on such topics as nymphomania and the women of the French Revolution. He writes with verve; if he doesn't have much new to say, he says it with style, and his fascination with his subjects is infectious. Scott offers neither an introduction nor a conclusion to the volume, so readers are left to draw their own conclusions about what connections he sees between these disparate lives and why he has chosen these six rather than some other set of women.
A scattered, unpretentious introduction to figures readers may be tempted to investigate further.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78607-193-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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
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