With ample quotes from English letters and diaries, Snow ably brings out the humanity of his subjects.
Veteran journalist Snow (To War with Wellington, 2010, etc.) novelistically recounts the British invasion of 1814.
Written from the British point of view, the characters come off as true gentlemen who were polite as they emptied warehouses, burned down homes and ravaged the countryside. In fairness, they only burned private property if the owners put up a fight. Worn out from fighting Napoleon in Europe, England was intent on finishing off this bit of nastiness in its former colony. Britain’s commander, Vice Adm. Alexander Cochrane, was after prize money in addition to revenge for his brother’s death at Yorktown. Naval leader George Cockburn, after savage behavior in the Chesapeake, joined with army leader Robert Ross to lead the attack on Washington, D.C. On the American side, horrendous leadership and coordination ensured a quick defeat. John Armstrong, a useless secretary of war, was President James Madison’s first error. His second was political appointee William Winder, a man detested by both Armstrong and Secretary of State James Monroe. The loss at Bladensburg, despite the bravery of Joshua Barney’s men, was humiliating, and the complete lack of a standing army or any defensive plan for the capital left it for the taking—and burning. That was the tipping point for the Americans. As the capital and White House burned, men raced to fortify and protect Baltimore. The survival of Fort McHenry after intense bombardment ended the battle with little loss. Our national anthem recalls the raising of its oversized U.S. flag. “The raising of the star-spangled banner,” writes the author, “became a symbol of [a] new determination. James Madison and his successors unashamedly abandoned their reservations about defense. They signaled their support for strong regular armed forces, and set the country on a path of expansion on land and at sea.”
With ample quotes from English letters and diaries, Snow ably brings out the humanity of his subjects.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04828-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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