De Villiers and Hirtle (Sable Island: The Strange Origins and Curious History of a Dune Adrift in the Atlantic, 2004, etc.) team up again to tackle the long, knotty history of a metropolis famed as the home of fabulous wealth and Islamic scholarship.
De Villiers assumes the personality of a jaunty traveler, while Hirtle is the intrepid archival scholar in this crammed account of the city in northwest Africa that “became a shorthand metaphor for a much greater body of stories and legends” about the Arab world. The popular Victorian expression “from here to Timbuktu” captures its perceived mystery and inaccessibility; indeed, even Timbuktu’s location, six miles from the source of the Niger River, prompted confusion in early explorers, who often thought the Niger was the Nile. Nomadic Tuareg herdsmen probably named the city after the well of Buktu around the 11th century—or the name might mean “woman with a large navel” in a local language. The authors present both possibilities, followed by a benumbing list of foreign emperors, kings and sultans, as the pre-Islamic Ghana-Wagadu kingdom gave way to waves of Arab invaders who made Timbuktu a crossroads of the trans-Saharan commercial trade, attracting gold and holy men from the Maghreb. The great kingdom of Mansa Musa (1312–1332) was succeeded by Tuareg, then Songhai rulers. Timbuktu became an important center of learning with extensive libraries (now being preserved). The Moroccan invasion of 1590 ushered in a decline later exacerbated by militant jihadists and European colonizers. The authors attempt to lighten the load of all this convoluted history with modern “travelers’ tales,” depicting Timbuktu today as decrepit and dusty but still unusually polyglot and ethnically diverse. A few contemporary anecdotes, however, can’t disguise the fact that this is essentially an academic resource for bookish trekkers.
Fascinatingly recondite, but also fairly deadening: scarcely useable or even readable for most pleasure travelers.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1497-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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