A comprehensive and, at times, lively chronicle, but not for casual readers with no prior knowledge of European history.
A sweeping chronicle of the rise and fall of the Habsburg dynasty.
In this ambitious overview, Rady, a professor of Central European history and author of The Habsburg Empire: A Very Short Introduction (2017), delivers a mostly chronological journey through the Habsburg dynasty from the 13th to the 20th centuries while contextualizing the times in which it flourished and, eventually, faded. Because the empire over which the Habsburgs reigned was enormous (“the Habsburgs were the first rulers whose power encompassed the world”), nonacademic readers may find it difficult to keep track of all the names and dates. Nevertheless, Rady valiantly attempts to give the principals some distinct accomplishments and traits: Maximilian (1459-1519), a self-promoter “who oversaw the composition of three allegorical autobiographies in which he depicted himself as the most chivalric and accomplished of knights,” brought Spain into the empire. Charles V, Maximilian’s grandson, attempted to outlaw Protestantism and eventually conceded that the Spanish Habsburgs would be split off from the Austrian Habsburgs and ruled respectively by his son Philip and brother Ferdinand while he retired to a monastery. Rudolph (1552-1612), a great art collector, employed Johannes Kepler as his astrologer, and Maria Theresa (1717-1780) instituted schooling for all children, frowned upon alchemy, and banned vampirism, which fascinated the media at the time: There were stories of “the undead feasting on the living, of exhumed bodies oozing with the blood of victims, and of stakings and beheadings.” Franz Joseph, whose nephew and heir would be assassinated in 1914, ruled for almost 70 years and created the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Though Rady is quick to acknowledge the Habsburgs’ missteps and weaknesses, he concludes that “their legacy survives…as a vision that combined power, destiny, and knowledge, and blended earthly and heavenly realms in a universal enterprise that touched every aspect of humanity’s temporal and spiritual experience.”
A comprehensive and, at times, lively chronicle, but not for casual readers with no prior knowledge of European history.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5416-4450-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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
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