A delightfully convincing case that Washington was history’s least ruthless and most successful revolutionary.
A provocative biography arguing that George Washington’s greatest accomplishment was guiding a rare revolution that turned out well for the revolutionaries.
Veteran historian O’Connell (Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman, 2014, etc.) reminds readers that most subsequent revolutions featured mass murder and ended in tyranny. In the first half of the book, the author travels familiar ground but does it with insight and wit. An unapologetic patrician, Washington yearned to scale Virginia’s aristocracy and Britain’s military. He succeeded in the first, becoming a leading figure in the French and Indian War and marrying Virginia’s richest widow. His failure, despite aggressive lobbying, to receive a royal commission was Britain’s first great mistake. A member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses, he dutifully supported opposition to Britain’s clumsy attempts to tax the colonists. By the time fighting broke out in 1775, everyone knew that Washington wanted to lead the army because he arrived at the Continental Congress in full dress uniform. Modern historians snicker, but it resonated with contemporaries, already impressed by his dignity, modesty, and reputation. He was the unanimous choice. O’Connell points out that Britain had long been crushing rebellions in Ireland and Scotland and saw no reason to change tactics in America. Even discounting patriot propaganda, looting and rape were common, prisoners were treated badly, and commanders known for cruelty were mostly British. Scholars wonder at his deference to the ineffectual Continental Congress. As generalissimo with a loyal cadre, he could have taken charge at any time but never did and expressed outrage when others suggested it. “He fervently believed in his own high-mindedness and was determined to conduct himself accordingly,” writes the author. “Nothing compromises morality like a long, violent revolution, and George Washington…remained a bulwark of decency, a remarkable achievement and possibly his greatest contribution to the Glorious Cause.”
A delightfully convincing case that Washington was history’s least ruthless and most successful revolutionary.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9699-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
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
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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