Entertaining popular history.
A social historian explores the “intellectual consequences” of the expeditions of Christopher Columbus, which “nudg[ed] Europeans toward modern ways of thinking about their planet.”
Appleby (History, Emeritus/UCLA; The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, 2010, etc.) makes the assertion that “the most significant consequence of the age of discovery is the awakening of curiosity among Europeans about the world in which they lived.” Not only was the geography of the known world stretched to include North and South America, but the biblical narrative of the Creation and God's purpose were also challenged. Thinkers raised the question of whether or not the Creation was a one-time event, considering the existence of human civilization in far-flung places. Some Christian missionaries condemned the brutality practiced by conquistadors, and Paul III issued a papal bull prohibiting the forced enslavement of native populations. Unfortunately, the argument became moot when millions of Native Americans were killed by European diseases and African slaves were forced by their European conquerors to work on plantations and gold mines. On the positive side, the widening of European horizons spurred intellectual curiosity, as well as the expanded knowledge needed to circumnavigate the globe—e.g., mapmaking, measuring the circumference of the Earth, astronomical knowledge and the determination of longitude. In fact, the attitude toward knowledge itself changed. “A passion for collecting information through observations, measurements, descriptions, and depictions of new phenomena grew stronger,” writes the author, replacing the scholarly focus on received wisdom. Appleby points out that in the beginning of the 17th century, Italian friar Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake when he challenged received wisdom, but by its end, “Newton laid the foundation for modern physical science.” A quick traverse over time leads the author to Darwin and the conclusion that Columbus' discovery hastened the tempo of intellectual discovery. “Over the course of four centuries,” she writes, “studying natural phenomena became an activity defining western modernity while loosening the hold of religious dogma over scientific inquiry.”
Entertaining popular history.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-23951-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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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