Well-researched, fascinating and thought-provoking.
Hudson’s first book is a scholarly examination of the ongoing debate about the authorship of the works of William Shakespeare.
Hudson argues that an obscure but talented woman named Amelia Bassano Lanier—posited to be both Shakespeare’s “dark lady” of the sonnets and a “secret Jew”—was in the right place at the right time, and had the right skills and knowledge, to be the true creator of classics such as Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing. Regardless of one’s opinion on the subject of the Bard of Avon’s works and their provenance, this book is a smart, wide-ranging examination of the society and circumstances of the 16th and 17th centuries. Subjects covered include Shakespearean scholarship itself (and its methods), life in late Renaissance London and the British royal court, English theater, plagues, gender, religion, intellectual life and a great deal more. Hudson argues that Shakespeare’s plays, like Lanier’s work, are highly critical of Christianity, that they reflect her travels (including a journey to Denmark) and that Lanier—like Shakespeare—is said to have undertaken a brief career as a schoolteacher. That Lanier had so much of the same background as Shakespeare supports Hudson’s theory; that she had even more of the necessary background than the Bard did (as a musician, a law clerk, etc.) makes Hudson’s case even more compelling. Even if Lanier didn’t write the works of Shakespeare, she is a notable person in her own right. Exhaustively documented, with a lengthy bibliography and full index, the volume is clearly written and makes a deeply intriguing case for its thesis. Although many readers will take exception to its ideas from the very beginning (not everyone agrees that the generally known biography of Shakespeare makes him “superhuman” or his efforts “impossible”), Hudson’s historical sleuthing and careful speculation make the Lanier theory at least as plausible as most of the others (from Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon on down). With graphics that include a “knowledge map” of which candidates might have been able to write which plays and symmetry analyses of some of the major works, the book advances these ideas concisely and with great rhetorical conviction.
Well-researched, fascinating and thought-provoking.Pub Date: April 30, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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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
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