A Canadian journalist (White Tribe Dreaming, 1988) with a strong knowledge of Russian history travels down the 2,000-mile Volga River. ``Mother and mistress, comrade and beloved, companion and teller of tall tales,'' the Volga is to Russia what the Mississippi is to the US and the Nile is to Egypt. De Villiers once worked as a foreign correspondent in Moscow; recently, when a small group of Russian journalists there told him of their plan to journey down the Volga, he jumped at the chance to join them. His adventures take him into the heartland of the country as he travels to such towns as Uglich, where the tragedy of Boris Godunov began in 1591; to Balakhna, where Peter the Great built many of his ships; to Gorky, where Sakharov was exiled; and to Ulyanovsk, where Lenin was born. Much has changed since the last time (perhaps ten years ago) that de Villiers visited Russia: Now, his movements are only nominally monitored and there is much freedom of expression as everyone he meets—from judges to peasants—talks of Gorbachev, glasnost, perestroika, and the future. ``People were coming to work bleary-eyed not from alcohol but from an overdose of politics,'' he writes. ``The whole country was on a politics binge, endlessly jabbering, endlessly arguing....'' Much, however, has stayed the same: It's still extraordinarily difficult to track down a person's telephone number or to get a seat in a restaurant. At times, especially when describing the machinations of his trip, de Villiers is a bit lengthy, but for the most part his smooth, well-written prose moves along at a rapid clip. A rich and deeply sympathetic look into parts of Mother Russia rarely visited by tourists. (Maps.)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-670-84353-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1991
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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