Flows quite nicely indeed: a first from freelancer Pierce. (Illustrations)
Eight centuries of British history from the vantage point of a structure that first spanned the Thames in 1176 and was rebuilt twice before being exiled, in 1968, to Lake Havasu, Arizona.
The first thing our mothers taught us isn’t so: London Bridge didn’t really fall down. It was certainly subject to the vicissitudes of fire, tempest, riot, and finally old age, but the great bridge with its 19 piers and 20 arches stood as a wonder through the days of the Plantagenets, Lancasters, Yorks, Tudors, Stuarts, and Hanovers. From Southwark to the City and back, the river that flowed quickly beneath carried Hogarth, Dickens, Jack Cade, Dick Whittington, Henry V, Elizabeth I, Samuel Pepys, and multitudes of Londoners and visitors. Rented residences and shops clung to both sides of the span. Chandlers, fishmongers, booksellers, butchers, and haberdashers made the path into a genuine strip mall, customarily managed by a self-regulating authority much like that of the New Jersey Turnpike. Tolls were collected from pedestrians and conveyances at various rates. At one time, the Clerk of the Drawbridge employed six carpenters, four masons, two sawyers, one mariner, one cook, a couple of rent collectors, and a rat catcher. Keeping traffic to the left (at the time a unique idea) occupied three traffic cops. Unusual events, crime, accidents, pageantry, and a superlative joust took place on the overpass, and for many years the severed heads of miscreants were displayed there on pikes. Thames watermen and swans negotiated the swirling offal and sewage dropped from buildings lining the old passage. In 1762, in a fit of urban renewal, the houses and shops were razed and the roadway widened. Not even 70 years later the demolition of the bridge itself began. The next London Bridge lasted until 1968, when it was sold to the Yanks.
Flows quite nicely indeed: a first from freelancer Pierce. (Illustrations)Pub Date: May 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-7472-3493-0
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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