A learned, eye-opening survey of the “mixed style” that shaped a nation’s culture and self-image. (70 pp. color and b&w...
A vast and rich panorama encompassing English literature, philosophy, science, art, and music.
Holding together a narrative of such ambition is a Herculean task, and British biographer/novelist Ackroyd (London, 2001, etc.) occasionally falters. For instance, he never fails to signal that A Big Theme is coming, e.g.: “In the course of this narrative it will be demonstrated that English literature, in particular, borrowed elements and themes from continental texts only to redefine them in the native style.” Nor is he averse to sending readers to the closest dictionary with words such as “hypnagogic” or “oneiric.” Ultimately, though, he’s saved by his erudition and panache, as he details how, starting with the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, the predominant strains of the English sensibility have been assimilation and adaptation. From Chaucer to Dickens, the polyglot culture of London encouraged creators to mix high and low, comedy and tragedy, sacred and profane, he writes. In a particularly fascinating section on how literature borrowed and blended elements from different sources, Ackroyd underscores the crucial impact of translation on the nation’s letters, not only through the King James Version of the Bible, but through Thomas Wyatt, Christopher Marlowe, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and William Wordsworth, whose poems were influenced by those they translated. Loss also figures in the English imagination, from the death of Arthur through the often melancholy strains of Ralph Vaughn Williams. Though most comfortable with literature, Ackroyd also verges afield with brio to analyze the national vogue for miniatures, gardening, and landscape painting. He can masterfully weave a creator’s life and work together, then summarize it with a pithy one-liner, as when he describes John Donne as “a disciple of death and a voluptuary of decay.”
A learned, eye-opening survey of the “mixed style” that shaped a nation’s culture and self-image. (70 pp. color and b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-49772-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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