Interesting reading for students of cultural history as well as Spanish-American relations over the centuries.
From Hispanophilia to Hispanophobia: a well-considered study of the shifting but, in its main outlines, surprisingly constant view of American elites toward the Spanish Other.
American culture has been bound up with Spanish, Spanish-American, and Hispanic cultures for far longer than the matter of Donald Trump and his wall, although that ugly business is just a reverberation from and continuation of the past. As Kagan (Emeritus, History/Johns Hopkins Univ.; Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, 2009, etc.) recounts in this scholarly study, Henry Adams, William Randolph Hearst, and a host of other influential Americans advanced the “Black Legend” of “the Spain of bloodthirsty conquistadors who slaughtered their way across the Americas” and otherwise contrasted Spanish civilization to the infinitely more enlightened—in their telling—Anglo-Saxon one. Against them were writers such as Washington Irving, who told tales of a sunny Spain, “a light-hearted, quasi-Oriental country that was charming, hospitable, and, most important, relentlessly romantic and picturesque.” William Dean Howells, for his part, called the Spanish “the honestest people in Europe,” leaving it to the likes of Ernest Hemingway to tell his compatriots that not all of them were top-notch fellows; even after the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway could be persuaded to go to Franco’s nation to catch a glimpse of his beloved bullfight. Kagan carefully documents changing attitudes over three centuries of Anglo-American interaction with Spain and its colonial descendants, attitudes that hinge on stereotypes good and bad, from Zorro to the Inquisition and Dolores del Río to Valeriano Weyler. Occasionally, the author even turns the tables, as when he notes that Hearst was broadly considered little more than a looter of Spanish culture "whose seemingly unquenchable appetite for Spanish art and antiques resulted in wholesale ‘destruction’ of Spain’s artistic and architectural patrimony,” just as Americans of many generations have appropriated things Spanish and Hispanic.
Interesting reading for students of cultural history as well as Spanish-American relations over the centuries.Pub Date: March 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0772-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
