Sturdy research and clear prose reveal some truly abominable snowmen wreaking havoc in Alaska.
A scandalous tale of rampant greed and criminal behavior amid a gold rush near Nome, Alaska, in 1900.
Freelance journalist Starobin, a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week, returns with a thoroughly researched account of a massive mining swindle in Nome. Thankfully, because the significant players are so abundant, he provides a cast of characters at the beginning of the book along with a simple but helpful map of the relevant area. But certain key figures quickly emerge and dominate, principally the master con man and powerful “boss” from North Dakota, Alexander McKenzie, who saw opportunity in Nome, headed north with some cronies (including lawyers), and abruptly took over mining claims from the less powerful. The author does an excellent job of moving readers around, teaching us about other figures who were there (including Wyatt Earp); providing some history of the region and of other gold rushes; giving deeper biographical information for some of the players; and describing the geography, weather, and modes of transportation and communication. Starobin begins with the discovery of gold before digging into the initial claims (some of the more surprising ones: on Nome’s Bering Sea beaches). The author then discusses McKenzie before telling us about his decision to go to Nome—and what he did when he got there. Using his considerable political influence, McKenzie got friendly local judges appointed and was cruising along—conning and usurping—when a court case on the issues ended up, on appeal, in the 9th Circuit in San Francisco. Also appearing in the narrative are President William McKinley, Attorneys General John W. Griggs and Philander C. Knox, and the members of the 9th Circuit. Tacit analogies to today’s political conditions abound, and while the occasional dense detail may be off-putting for some readers, the story is entertaining.
Sturdy research and clear prose reveal some truly abominable snowmen wreaking havoc in Alaska.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-4230-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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
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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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