Not for the faint of heart, the faint of stomach or those put off by relentless descriptions of battle scenes.
French colonialism goes awry in a saga of hope, betrayal, slaughter and cannibalism in 19th-century North Africa.
British desert explorer and Morocco resident Asher (Khartoum: The Ultimate Imperial Adventure, 2008, etc.) tracks the French government’s ambitious plan to build a railroad from Algiers to Timbuctoo (as it was spelled in those days). The Trans-Saharan Railway was intended not so much to carry human passengers as to convey French commercial goods into the vast markets of African nations and return with exotic natural resources to be shipped to Paris. Not so incidentally, the railroad’s planners expected that it would speed the spread of French morality among the Sahara Desert’s tribes, whom they viewed as benighted heathens. In 1880, Paul Flatters led a mission into the populated portion of Algeria and from there into the desert to map the proposed railway route. A veteran of the French Army of Africa, Flatters craved renown and saw this as his chance: “The man who led the Trans-Saharan survey mission would go down in history as the last of the great Saharan explorers.” Flatters felt certain he could negotiate with nomadic tribes that controlled the desert, even though the Tuareg in particular were known for their hostility to interlopers on their land. His naiveté cost him and dozens in his party their lives; on February 16, 1881, more than 300 Tuareg warriors attacked the expedition. Asher builds the tension slowly but inexorably toward this climactic battle, during which Flatters was murdered. It occurs slightly before the book’s midpoint; after that, the narrative devolves into a gruesome account of the survivors’ struggles against thirst and starvation as well as lethal tribesmen. The agony was relentless as they dragged themselves toward safety, their camels stolen or dead. The survivors’ desperate resort to cannibalism will horrify, but not surprise, readers.
Not for the faint of heart, the faint of stomach or those put off by relentless descriptions of battle scenes.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60239-630-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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