A rather odd book, sketching the history of a 19th-century revolt against industrial machinery and seeking to find in it some lessons for today. Although efforts by workers to smash machinery that they suspected might rob them of jobs have been traced as far back as 1675, and similar occurrences took place in the United States in the 1820s and '30s, the 15-month period of Luddite activity from 1811 to early 1813 (which included ``pseudonymous letters, nighttime raids, quasi-military operations...and a campaign to instigate fear'') has attracted the most attention from historians- -more than may seem warranted. Protests in the name of a nonexistent General Ned Ludd broke out mainly in the English midlands, causing some ú100,000 worth of damage and great trepidation in the upper classes, but the unrest was effectively ended by the execution of 14 ringleaders in January 1813. The conditions that provoked Luddite actions were appalling, and indeed Charlotte Brontâ described these events as ``a sort of moral earthquake,'' but the contemporary relevance Sale (The Conquest of Paradise, 1990, etc.) sees in them remains doubtful. The last third of the book is devoted to the horrors of current technology, ranging from the joblessness it produces (``the notion that new technology somehow creates new jobs and increased wealth is hogwash''); to a list of grievances and disasters (Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez, the fact that ``computers are always `down' when you need them,'' etc.); to the creation of ``disposable jobs.'' Sale is a little coy about what he would do about all this, quoting proponents of ``the dismantling of nuclear, chemical, biogenetic, electromagnetic, television and computer technologies''; praising a farmer who does his work with horses and writes with a pencil, in daytime, without electric light; and finding an ideal in old Amish communities and in Indian tribes. The author's anger against the excesses of our industrial civilization is clear enough, but his remedies are unpersuasive.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-201-62678-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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