Rigorous history infused with boundless love.
Something of a Wild Scot himself, Fry (How the Scots Made America, 2005, etc.) proffers a magisterial, if not always limpid, history of his country and people.
The resilient Highland Scots, the author reminds us, have battled poverty, English domination, church shenanigans, the encroachment of non-Gaelic culture, ineffective land reform, emigration, poor harvests and—often most violently—one another. Fry, who here incorporates quotes from Gaelic and English literature and other Scottish histories, brings to the task both a fierce devotion to detail and an infectious affection for his country. The fate of the Gaelic language is one of his principal concerns, and by the end, he grudgingly and wistfully acknowledges that it is not long for this world, at least in its spoken form. He begins with the death of Elizabeth I and the elevation/transformation of James VI of Scotland to James I of England. Fry discusses the complexity of clans and later reveals that the vast enterprise of tartans owes more to the weaving industry than to clan history. He deals fairly with the sanguinary years of civil war and religious transformation. He records with a journalist’s clarity such moments as the 1727 burning of Scotland’s last “witch”; portly George IV’s pivotal 1822 visit to Scotland; the 1846 potato famine (Fry claims the Scots handled it much more humanely and efficiently than the Irish); and a 1988 oil-platform disaster in the North Sea. Less engaging for general readers are the learned but lugubrious disquisitions on land legislation and religious reform. Of great use are maps, a list of key characters and a chronology.
Rigorous history infused with boundless love.Pub Date: March 15, 2007
ISBN: 0-7195-6104-3
Page Count: 380
Publisher: John Murray Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
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. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
