An insightful perspective on Conrad’s life and turbulent times.
An absorbing biography melds history and literary analysis.
Jasanoff (History/Harvard Univ.; Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, 2011, etc.), who has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and the George Washington Book Prize, asserts that the novels of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) “meditate on how to behave in a globalizing world,” where characters “confront some critical choice, only to face consequences more far-ranging than they ever imagined.” Drawing on Conrad’s many works of fiction, memoir, letters, and essays, Jasanoff focuses especially on his most famous novels—The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo—to reveal how he responded to a roiling age plagued by anarchy, revolution, and oppression. His characters “struggle with displacement, alienation, and despair,” caused by both external and internal forces. Conrad, Jasanoff reveals, was “perpetually depressed, incorrigibly cynical, alarmingly prejudiced” against Asians and Jews, and beset by childhood experiences that inspired his “fatalistic sense of the world as a realm where, no matter how hard you tried to make your own way, you might never slip the tracks of destiny.” As a teenager, he set out alone from his native Poland, then under Russian domination, determined to become a seaman; in 1878, he arrived in cosmopolitan London and began a career in the merchant marine, rising to the rank of captain over the next 20 years. Travels throughout the world fueled his imagination. During voyages to Asia, he “stowed away landscapes, characters, and plots” that inspired “half of everything Conrad ever published.” In rich detail, Jasanoff skillfully contextualizes his work within “a chain of historical events” that led to profound social and political change. Heart of Darkness, for example, was “closely pegged” to King Leopold II’s ruthless exploitation of the Congo. Jasanoff focuses less on Conrad’s family life (his wife and sons are lightly sketched) than on the prescient “global compass” of his literary works.
An insightful perspective on Conrad’s life and turbulent times.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59420-581-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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
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