Any student of the Renaissance should read this excellent work showing Spain’s enormous impact on the arts and, with her...
A bright, wide-ranging chronicle of the golden age of the Spanish empire.
Though Goodwin (Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies/Univ. Coll. London; Crossing the Continent 1527-1540: The Story of the First African-American Explorer of the American South, 2008) denies that he has written a magisterial work filled with scholarly detail but rather a book for the “idle reader,” it is a well-researched, intelligent, and easily understood history of the first global empire on Earth. The author divides the work into two sections: “Gold” deals with the historical, economic, and political history, and “Glitter” explores literary and artistic works. At the beginning of the empire, King Charles V realized that the great wealth of silver and gold arriving from America would require a bureaucracy to ensure the availability of the banks, postal service, food, and roads essential for the movement of troops and supplies. He had to be well-organized and wealthy to wage wars and contain an empire that included the Netherlands, Naples, the Holy Roman Empire, and, eventually, Portugal. Charles was also an avid collector of Renaissance art and appointed the Venetian artist Titian as court painter. His son, Philip II, inherited a well-oiled machine that enabled him to expand the vast art collection his father had begun. He laid the path for Spain’s great artists Velázquez, Murillo, and El Greco, who were joined by great writers and thinkers like Cervantes, Góngora, and Quevedo. Goodwin not only shows the greatness of Spain’s empire, but also explains the psyche of Spaniards during the time. They preferred poverty over labor and honor over trade, and they were obsessed with purity of blood. The latter aspect was one of the prime drivers of the Inquisition, formed to rid Spain of lapsed Christians who had converted from Judaism during the diaspora of 1492.
Any student of the Renaissance should read this excellent work showing Spain’s enormous impact on the arts and, with her vast American empire, the world.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62040-360-0
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Jon Krakauer selected this 1982 account of “breathtaking acts of deceit” by early explorers for his Modern Library Exploration series, partly because it goes far in explaining why its subjects (few of them cowards) would try so hard to convince others (or themselves) of their phony accomplishments. Well-known travel-writer Jan Morris, in her short introduction, notes the incredible pathos to Roberts’s sympathetic tales of ten men who staged elaborate hoaxes in pursuit of fame and glory. The best known among them (Sebastian Cabot, Admiral Byrd, and Robert Peary) all faked exploratory achievement to satisfy both childhood frustrations and adult hunger. Kirkus (Sept. 1, 1982, p. 1051) found little new information here, but we thought that Roberts (author of more than a dozen works on exploration and mountaineering) rendered these tales “more accessible,” livelier, and more “sensitive” than previous accounts. The bottom line: “good fun for exploration buffs, and entertaining enough to appeal to a wider, offbeat audience.”
Pub Date: March 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-78324-5
Page Count: 225
Publisher: Modern Library
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A slight and strident autobiographical account of an American academic's four-month stay on an Israeli kibbutz in 1992. Ferguson (Political Science and Women's Studies/Univ. of Hawaii at Manoa), who's married to an Israeli, records her impressions of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in this political tract written in diary form. The issues she raises—the treatment of the Palestinians under Israeli military government, the secondary status of women in public life—are considered here in an ideologically hidebound manner, and her predictable observations and reactions are couched in inexpressive academic jargon. Visiting a ``phallic marble monument'' to Egyptian soldiers (a product of the Camp David Accords), Ferguson comments that ``this marker interrupts the dominant discursive terrain upon which memory is constituted.'' And in noting that there are many ``voices'' in Israel, she claims that ``one of the tasks of the Israeli state has been to mask this turbulence...in ways that co- opt or delegitimize its subversions.'' Nowhere in this book do we get a glimmer of a counter-argument—that the male militarism she so roundly condemns might be related to the militarism of Israel's enemies. The book is also riddled with errors, including the incorrect transliteration of important terms (for example, jamsin instead of hamsin, the hot desert wind). While insisting on theoretical correctness, Ferguson displays a practical ignorance about Arab and Israeli culture and religion. Throughout the book, she cites the Jerusalem Post as a reflection of Israeli public opinion, apparently unaware that, a few years before her stay in Israel, the paper was taken over in a right-wing ``coup'' and most of the editorial staff left to write for more politically moderate papers. Thankfully, Ferguson quotes liberally from well-informed and articulate critics of Israeli society, but this journal indicates that she has yet to join their ranks.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-9623879-6-7
Page Count: 136
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
© Copyright 2025 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.
