Exciting, well told, and befitting the wild life of a pirate—even if Kidd wasn’t one.
A dashingly narrated life of Captain William Kidd, freeing him of his unwarranted reputation as a notorious pirate.
Kidd was no pirate, historian Zacks (History Laid Bare, not reviewed, etc.) argues in this solidly documented historical thriller, but a New York sea captain with a house, wife, and child on Wall Street, and with a special commission from King William III and other notables to hunt pirates and divvy up the booty with his backers. This was an exceptional charge, since it allowed Kidd to circumvent the Admiralty court. But it was also a secret commission, and his actions won him few friends in the Royal Navy, which frowned on privateers of any stripe, or with the East India Company, which suffered as a result of his work. Recreating in great detail Kidd’s months searching for bounty, yet doing so with a verve that keeps the story light on its feet, Zacks also sets straight the life of the pirates—violent and short, certainly, but far more democratic than that experienced by those on land. It was Kidd’s ill luck to take a glorious treasure from a Moslem vessel, throwing the East India Company’s best-laid plans in India into a precarious position. The captain was left out on a limb, and his backers quickly disavowed any knowledge of his commission, for treason was the charge here. Zacks reveals the double-cross through a paper trail of logbooks, diaries, letters, and transcripts of the trial that sent Kidd to the gallows while his erstwhile pirate nemesis, Robert Culliford, walked free from Newgate Prison. In addition, Zacks paints a real-life picture of the pirates’ port of choice in the 1690s—New York City—its customs, the fluid politics that pertained to maritime affairs, and even what it was like to attend a hanging.
Exciting, well told, and befitting the wild life of a pirate—even if Kidd wasn’t one.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6533-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
A cool, intellectual biography of the patrician southern politician who became one of America's most influential opponents of the Vietnam war. Arkansas Democrat J. William Fulbright (190595), a senator for 30 years, was the longest-serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in US history (195974). He was capable of great courage: in his crucial early support for American entry into the United Nations, in his opposition to McCarthyism, in founding the international academic exchange program that bears his name, and in his 1966 call for talks with Red China. On the other hand, Fulbright's refusal to break ranks with southern segrationists marred his distinguished record. Woods (History/Univ. of Arkansas) argues that Fulbright, a wealthy intellectual with little interest in domestic issues, was incapable of empathizing with his poorer black and white constituents. His concerns were international, and he was years ahead of most of his colleagues in his nuanced views of communism, anticolonial national liberation movements, and the Cold War. By 1966, Fulbright had concluded that the nation's leaders were tragically mistaken in believing that Vietnam was a crucial battlefield against international communism. He convened historic Senate hearings that for the first time debated a war in which the US government was still involved. Woods offers intimate, thoroughly researched insights into the reasoning behind this and other major policy positions taken by Fulbright over his long career. He is far less revealing about his subject's personal life, saying, in effect, that to know the politics is to know the man. This analytical approach fails in areas, such as civil rights, where Fulbright was sketchy about revealing his decision-making process. On most issues, however, the senator left an extensive public and private record that Woods has mined with great skill. A window into US history from the genesis of the Cold War to America's withdrawal from Vietnam: crucial reading for anyone who would understand the politics of that era. (15 halftones, not seen)
Pub Date: July 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-521-48262-3
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
Paradoxes aplenty within this serene, astute book, which will invite much discussion.
Three well-hewn essays by longtime Asia observer Smith (Japan: A Reinterpretation, 1997, etc.) explore the West’s heavy shadow over Japan, China and India, and new attempts to shake it off.
The author has trekked through these countries asking questions about what is “real” in their cultures and histories and what has been assumed from the West—or, what is often manifested as nostalgia for the old ways, and what emerges as ressentiment (“submerged sensation of impotence”) toward the forcibly new and modern. Since the 19th century, when modernization was introduced in these countries, the Asian self has divided, or “doubled,” into the modern self, which assimilated Western habits and notions of time, and the traditional, which treasured the indigenous and authentic. In “Calligraphy and Clocks,” Smith looks at the blatant effects of Westernization in places such as the village of Kitakyushu, Japan, transformed into a steel town by the postwar “Japanese miracle”; Guangzhou, China, the meeting between China’s past and future, where Deng Xiaoping is quoted as saying, “To get rich is glorious”; and Sandur, India (“the saddest village I have ever seen, though not the poorest by a long way”), where the textile manufacturing so valued by Gandhi has been superseded by mining. The Chinese elemental notions of li (the law of things) and qi (physical matter) have morphed into today’s driving concepts of ti (essence) and yong (function)—a transformation, writes Smith, that provides a key to understanding the Asian mindset. In “The Buddhas at Qixia,” the author examines each country’s manipulation of its past, including Japan’s alienation from nature and China’s amnesia of the Cultural Revolution. Finally, in “The Skyward Garden,” Smith challenges the Western obsession with a nation’s having a purpose, incompatible with Eastern ideals, and suggests rather that each country “will have to imagine itself anew.”
Paradoxes aplenty within this serene, astute book, which will invite much discussion.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-375-42550-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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