Absorbing perspectives on what drove the messianic leader of the Taiping uprising that convulsed China during the mid-19th century. Drawing on contemporary texts, noted Yale sinologist Spence (Chinese Roundabout, 1992, etc.) provides a nuanced account of the spiritual life of Hong Xiuquan, a convert to Christianity whose vivid fantasies or visions doomed him to become a crucifer of blood. A native of rural Hua, Hong came to Canton in 1836 at age 22 to sit for civil-service examinations but failed the tests that could have made him a career bureaucrat. In the provincial capital, however, he was exposed to the evangelical doctrines preached by dedicated Christian missionaries from Europe and the US. Convinced by dreams that he was the younger brother of Jesus, whose duty was to establish a Heavenly Kingdom (Taiping) on earth, Hong eventually attracted a considerable following. Aided by widespread discontent with the Manchu regime that erupted after the Opium War, his movement became a religious and military force to be reckoned with. Having flooded into the eastern reaches of the Yangtze River Valley, the so-called God-worshippers seized Nanjing in 1853. Secure in this waterside stronghold, the insurgents built their New Jerusalem, bowdlerized the Old Testament (mainly to give Jesus a less reproachable lineage), and threatened to overrun all of South China. Concerned for the security of their Shanghai trading concessions, Western powers (notably, the UK) backed the central government, which recaptured Nanjing in 1864. Hong died of natural causes weeks before the final defeat, leaving bitter memories of a celestial state that cost millions their lives during its 11-year duration. With a storyteller's flair that other scholars can only envy, Spence provides lucid context for a remarkable but unfamiliar chapter in Chinese and world history. (maps and illustrations, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03844-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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