Following his earlier Thomas Jefferson: A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity (1989—not reviewed), Old Dominion professor Mapp offers a graceful, admiring assessment of the great democrat as President and as the aged but still intellectually vital ``Sage of Monticello.'' As President, Jefferson eased people's fears about the radical tendencies of his Democratic-Republican Party by ``taking things by the smooth handle.'' Mapp takes sharp issue with such Jefferson critics as Henry Adams and Theodore Roosevelt, who depicted the Virginian as both a hypocrite who violated his ``strict constructionist'' principles while in office and as a pacifist who left the nation woefully unprepared for the War of 1812. Instead, Mapp sees Jefferson as an activist, visionary chief executive who used his authority to order military action against the Barbary pirates, advance judicial reform, double the size of the nation through the Louisiana Purchase, and institute an embargo that kept peace with Great Britain while the US built up its navy. (Mapp does fault Jefferson for falling short of his libertarian ideals in condoning General James Wilkinson's trampling on civil liberties in New Orleans and in branding Aaron Burr as a traitor before his former Vice President came to trial.) Stepping down at the end of his second term in 1809, Jefferson battled debt, legal and family problems, and physical deterioration to shepherd the Univ. of Virginia from an innovative educational concept into actual physical existence—``one of the great triumphs of the human spirit,'' according to Mapp. An engrossing biography that pays full tribute to Jefferson's personal genius and political achievements. (B&w illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8191-8053-X
Page Count: 446
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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
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