A useful biography that provides an honest reckoning of Washington’s life and legacy.
A scholar of American history and former presidential speechwriter delves into the last poignant years of the first president and his struggle to define his legacy.
Finally leaving the nation’s capital of Philadelphia upon his successor’s inauguration on March 4, 1797, bound for his beloved Virginia home, Mount Vernon, George Washington did not realize how arduous his retirement was going to prove after eight years as president. He was 65 and healthy, yet the pressures were enormous, as Horn (The Man Who Would Not Be Washington: Robert E. Lee's Civil War and His Decision That Changed American History, 2016) clearly delineates in this welcome new biography of “America’s first post-presidency.” Mount Vernon was bleeding money and in disarray, requiring countless repairs. Washington was in debt and could not rid himself of his numerous slaves because they belonged to the estate of his wife’s first husband. Furthermore, the construction of the new capital, Washington, was proving a headache of epic proportions—as was tension with France, prompting the new president, John Adams, to appoint Washington as commander in chief just when he was hoping to be left alone as a private citizen. In addition to entertaining numerous guests, including “a party of French princes, cousins to the guillotined king,” at Mount Vernon, Washington had to deal with his stepson “Wash,” who was turning out to be a loafer and miscreant. His dear friend the Marquis de Lafayette was imprisoned in Austria amid the French Revolution, prompting his wife to send the marquis’ teenage son to America to live with the former president as a refugee, though the president felt guilty for not being able to publicly shelter the boy sooner. In a readable style that includes an appropriate amount of quoting from primary sources, Horn ably captures the tension of Washington’s inner turmoil as he continued to deal with urgent dispatches and unwanted news from the capital.
A useful biography that provides an honest reckoning of Washington’s life and legacy.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5423-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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
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