Intimate, spellbinding drama of the affinity between friends, each struggling in his own way to tell the country the truth...
Journalist and historian Perry (Lift Up Thy Voice, 2001, etc.) examines in remarkable detail the 15-month period during which two iconic American figures produced monumental American literature.
Ulysses S. Grant (1822–85) had the greater struggle. Left holding the bag in 1884 after his Wall Street partner absconded, the two-term president and the country’s greatest general was flat broke, with a cancerous growth fatally rooted at the back of his mouth. Mark Twain (1835–1910), younger by a dozen years, had evolved over the previous decade from an unabashed fan into a close friend and confidant of Grant’s. The two initially had little more in common than an upbringing in the West (Twain actually served a few weeks in a Confederate unit before abandoning the Civil War entirely), but both loved to tell stories while smoking cigars. Not privy at first to the seriousness of Grant’s illness, Twain proposed that the general write his memoirs as a favor to the nation and a way to make money for both of them; Perry avers that Twain hoped to secure the publishing rights as a largesse for the company he owned, fronted by his niece’s husband. The proud and modest Grant had no income and dismissed any attempts at financial aid, no matter how well disguised, even from fellow officers who had stayed close. He had resisted writing his memoirs, the author states, for fear that a poor reception would further embarrass his family. After winning him over, Twain took up an unfinished novel he had put down years before without a clue to an ending; now he finally got his scapegrace hero and runaway slave off the river to complete The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Intimate, spellbinding drama of the affinity between friends, each struggling in his own way to tell the country the truth about itself.Pub Date: May 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-679-64273-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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
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
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