Significant ideas entangled in turgid and uninviting prose.
A dense reassessment of an iconic figure in American history with special attention to his notion of race relations as a key to social progress for African-Americans.
West (History/College of the Holy Cross) presents not so much a biography of Washington as a history of an idea. In fact, those hoping to read a narrative about Washington’s life had best look elsewhere, for West buries his biographical details in protracted paragraphs (some featuring words like “problematizing”) that general readers will find more dissuasive than inviting. It is pleasant to take a leisurely journey along the path of a 125-word sentence in Trollope, but following the lengthy, labyrinthine trail blazed by a less skilled writer is merely tedious. This is not to impugn either the author’s research or its results. There is much to think about and learn in these pages. West reminds us that Washington was not the only former slave who lived out a tale worthy of Horatio Alger (who, as the author points out, began publishing his stories about the time Washington was born, in 1856). West also deals frankly with Washington’s nearly fanatical fastidiousness (a former student recalls Washington’s pauses in grammar lessons to chide his charges about their personal hygiene) and with his wont to ridicule blacks in his speeches before white audiences. But West’s principal interest is to explore the origins of Washington’s belief in “race relations” and to analyze its pernicious consequences. Washington and his followers failed to see that their focus on “getting along” delayed rather than accelerated the granting of full human and civil rights to blacks. De jure and de facto segregation were the result; Jim Crow was the beneficiary. West believes that Washington’s notion persists in many quarters and concludes that “American democracy was betrayed by the American people.” The author offers interesting assessments of other commentators on race—especially Gunnar Myrdal and (a surprise) William Dean Howells.
Significant ideas entangled in turgid and uninviting prose.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-231-13048-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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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