Still, this is certainly the biography against which to measure the lurid claims and devout counterclaims prompted by the...
Sutin (Divine Invasions, 1989) paints a rich narrative of the eccentric visionary Aleister Crowley’s life, which now seems somewhat ho-hum as for his sexual escapades—the source of much of his bad press—but all the more vile for his egomania and fascist tendencies.
He was called the wickedest man on earth; he also adorned the cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album: Aleister Crowley was an expert on the art of high magic, the white variety (which has nothing to do with purity and everything to do with “the most sublime privilege of man”): “By development of will-power, by rigorous self-control, by solitude, meditation and prayer, a man may be granted the Knowledge and Conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel.” The author’s intent is to get beyond the exotic image. This he does mostly by putting Crowley’s human face on display: the mountaineer, the family man, the serious investigator of the astral plane. Yet ever-present are Crowley’s ugly maneuverings in the magic community, his pleasure at Hitler’s supposed use of his work, and his abuse of friends. Crowley’s sexual acrobatics no longer shock, and they are unconvincing as a sacramental ritual. Sutin is a very clean writer, which makes a difference considering the level of detail on parade (“From March 23 to April 7, Crowley endured a fallow period”), but he fails to convey any sense of Crowley’s mystical notions or experiences. When he relates that “In the Tenth Aethyr, Crowley would confront the Dispersion of the Abyss,” it might as well be liner notes for a PlayStation game, and when a character whispers “Chaos is my name, and thick darkness,” the reader gets no chill.
Still, this is certainly the biography against which to measure the lurid claims and devout counterclaims prompted by the Crowley legend. (photos, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-25243-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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
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