From the Ice Age until 1992: the story of Wales, expertly chronicled by renowned Welsh scholar Davies (Welsh History/University College of Wales). The Welsh can claim to be the original Britons. They preserved a language and culture—and, for many centuries, a legal code— that, along with their topographical isolation, kept them distinct from the Angles (``English''), Saxons, and later Norman invaders. The subjugation of Welsh land by the English occurred in stages: the vanquishing of Llywelyn's revolution in 1282; the Act of Union in 1532; and the effects of the new commercial world that opened up after the Revolution of 1689 and led to the mixed blessings of the Industrial Revolution. Here, Davies relates the history of his people with proper pride. Avoiding sentimental generalizations and the temptation of portraying the Welsh as victims, he offers a closely written monument of scholarship lightened by flashes of dry humor. Davies sees radicalism as an important Welsh trait, exemplified in the Welsh role in the Chartist movement and, more recently, in the politics of the Liberal and Labor parties. He questions the common view that Methodism and Revivalism were authentic expressions of Welsh culture, and he points out that many Welsh migrated to America, especially to Pennsylvania, and that one-third of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were their descendants. In the late 18th century, he adds, rumors abounded that America had been ``discovered'' in 1170 by a Welshman, one Madog, and that a tribe of Welsh-speaking Indians, the Madogwys, still dwelt deep within the continent. Davies devotes the last third of his book to the recent political scene in Wales, including the growth of the nationalist party, Plaid Cymru. He concludes that tenacity and adaptation to changed circumstances are the hallmarks of this nation, whose fullness is yet to be. Not for the casual reader—but a must for all who love to trace the story of an ancient people. (Thirty-three maps and diagrams)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-713-99098-8
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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