A fine contribution to our understanding of the culture that “knit together east and west.”
Rather than being the murderous mob depicted in film and popular history, the Mongol horde, this book reveals, was a complex Euro-Asian culture whose history “remains as though behind a veil.”
From the 13th to 15th centuries, the nomadic people who composed the horde bestrode the vast treeless Eurasian grasslands, the steppe, that stretched thousands of miles across Siberia and west into central Europe. Deriving from the 12th-century conqueror Genghis Khan and existing, via his sons and others, into the 14th-century days of the great military commander Tamerlane, the horde divided and subdivided into many groups. Yet, as Favereau shows, its component parts maintained a remarkably rich and stable culture while absorbing and equitably governing the peoples it subdued. As much a community as a state, the horde created “a new kind of empire” suited to the ecosystem it occupied. The author dispels the myth that it was just a rampaging mass of warriors; it possessed great governing skills, was adept at social relationships, and remained a major force on the Eurasian landmass until it began to withdraw eastward after the Black Death. So why has its history been unknown and ignored? Because, Favereau contends, the Mongols, a herding, horse-riding agricultural people always on the move, left little by way of architecture, literature, and urban centers. This book helps rectify their absence from Western consciousness and fills a major gap in our knowledge of world history. Although the author writes her largely academic work with more fervor than grace, she fully succeeds in rescuing her misunderstood subject from the world of poetry and myth and anchoring it firmly in scholarly learning. Readers will have to adjust to little-known names, terms, and geographical realities, but Favereau does her best to help, and numerous maps, often missing in books of this sort, offer skilled assistance.
A fine contribution to our understanding of the culture that “knit together east and west.”Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-674-24421-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.
A story of ordinary people, both victims and survivors, thrown into extraordinary history.
Pellegrino says his book is “simply the story of what happened to people and objects under the atomic bombs, and it is dedicated to the hope that no one will ever witness this, or die this way, again.” Images of Aug. 6, 1945, as reported by survivors, include the sight of a cart falling from the sky with the hindquarters of the horse pulling it still attached; a young boy who put his hands over his eyes as the bomb hit—and “saw the bones of his fingers shining through shut eyelids, just like an X-ray photograph”; “statue people” flash-fossilized and fixed in place, covered in a light snowfall of ashes; and, of course, the ghosts—people severely flash-burned on one side of their bodies, leaving shadows on a wall, the side of a building, or whatever stood nearby. The carnage continued for days, weeks, and years as victims of burns and those who developed various forms of cancer succumbed to their injuries: “People would continue to die in ways that people never imagined people could die.” Scattered in these survivor stories is another set of stories from those involved in the development and deployment of the only two atomic weapons ever used in warfare. The author also tells of the letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard to Franklin D. Roosevelt that started the ball rolling toward the formation of the Manhattan Project and the crew conversations on the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, the planes that dropped the Little Boy on Hiroshima and the Fat Man on Nagasaki. We have to find a way to get along, one crew member said, “because we now have the wherewithal to destroy everything.”
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798228309890
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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