A strange corner of the Cold War explored, to fascinating result.
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this metaphor!
In this leisurely, searching footnote to history, Wright (Institute for Cultural Analysis, Nottingham Trent Univ.; Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine, 2002, etc.) examines one of its little fibs and fudges: the authorship of the pregnant phrase “iron curtain.” Winston Churchill arrived in Fulton, Mo., on March 5, 1946, to give an address at Westminster College with Harry Truman, and there uttered the famous phrase, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” That much is well-known; less documented is the outraged response to Churchill’s formulation in the same address that Britain and the United States had a special relationship likely to become more special once the two nations stood up to Josef Stalin and his empire-building ambitions. Churchill weathered a storm of criticism from left and right (and the French, who resented being left out), but in time that storm quieted. Five years later, a package arrived at Churchill’s door containing a copy of the American College Dictionary and a note from its editor asking whether the “iron curtain” phrase was Churchill’s own. The bulldog replied in the affirmative, and therein lies the nub and the rub: For, as Wright ably chronicles, Churchill acknowledged the existence of the very real iron curtain, a fire-suppressing fixture of Victorian theaters, while saying that he hadn’t heard of the phrase used before him in its metaphorical sense. Thus it is that many dictionaries today attribute authorship to Churchill. Wright chases the phrase down, finding it in use in the early 20th century among British wonks before the outbreak of World War I. It then shifted eastward to refer to the divisions between the Bolsheviks and the rest of Europe in the 1930s. Wright’s investigation concludes with late developments in the phrase and its ideological uses and abuses in the era of McCarthy, atom spies and spooks.
A strange corner of the Cold War explored, to fascinating result.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-19-923150-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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