Of the many books since the 1960s that claim to overturn the clichÇ of Victorian prudery, this is surely the least interesting, persuasive, and readable. Mason (English/Univ. College, London) broadly defines the Victorian era as starting with the 1790s—the Romantic, Regency, or Georgian period—and petering out well before 1900, his cut-off date. He's certainly done resourceful and intensive research (check out the mammoth bibliography); his text considers such varied sources as working-class papers, medical reports, popular culture, and religious writing. Missing, however, is analysis of the major cultural landmarks that Peter Gay illuminates so brilliantly in his still uncompleted series on ``the bourgeois experience.'' Using imperfectly assimilated sociological jargon, Mason argues that a crisis in confidence in courtship and marriage for the first two or three decades of the 19th century encouraged prostitution and casual sex; that interest in marriage and concubinage was renewed at mid-century; and that the introduction of artificial contraception revived sexuality after 1860. The moral ``recalibration'' that began in the lower classes with a rise in sexual ``moralism,'' he asserts, became a sign of political progress throughout the period, touching the middle classes as well. Considering popular entertainments, housing, class orientation, and medical attitudes, he finds a discrepancy between sexual attitudes and behavior—in brief, Victorian hypocrisy—a discrepancy he criticizes Foucault for overlooking, but one that he claims anthropologists find in many societies. While the material is interesting, Mason's focus is so narrow, his writing so gnarled, his syntax so confusing, his structure so uncertain, that it is difficult to follow his argument or ascertain the direction in which he is moving (toward the end he proposes a second volume). Hard to imagine why anyone would prefer this volume to Gay's, or even read it afterward.
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-812247-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.
A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe.
For his tenth book, science writer Kelly (Three on the Edge, 1999, etc.) delivers a cultural history of the Black Death based on accounts left by those who witnessed the greatest natural disaster in human history. Spawned somewhere on the steppes of Central Asia, the plague arrived in Europe in 1347, when a Genoese ship carried it to Sicily from a trading post on the Black Sea. Over the next four years, at a time when, as the author notes, “nothing moved faster than the fastest horse,” the disease spread through the entire continent. Eventually, it claimed 25 million lives, one third of the European population. A thermonuclear war would be an equivalent disaster by today's standards, Kelly avers. Much of the narrative depends on the reminiscences of monks, doctors, and other literate people who buried corpses or cared for the sick. As a result, the author has plenty of anecdotes. Common scenes include dogs and children running naked, dirty, and wild through the streets of an empty village, their masters and parents dead; Jews burnt at the stake, scapegoats in a paranoid Christian world; and physicians at the University of Paris consulting the stars to divine cures. These tales give the author opportunities to show Europeans—filthy, malnourished, living in densely packed cities—as easy targets for rats and their plague-bearing fleas. They also allow him to ramble. Kelly has a tendency to lose the trail of the disease in favor of tangents about this or that king, pope, or battle. He returns to his topic only when he shifts to a different country or city in a new chapter, giving the book a haphazard feel. Remarkably, the story ends on a hopeful note. After so many perished, Europe was forced to develop new forms of technology to make up for the labor shortage, laying the groundwork for the modern era.
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000692-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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
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