Incomplete.
On the journey from hunter-gatherers to investment bankers, we have become more dangerous to one another.
Osborne (The Floating Egg: Episodes in the Making of Geology, not reviewed) set himself a daunting task—to confine to fewer than 500 pages the sprawl of western history. The result: vast historical events and supreme personalities merit only sentences or paragraphs. The author begins with one of George W. Bush’s statements after 9/11 about the choice between civilization and chaos. Osborne wonders, What is civilization? He answers that it’s a narrative we tell ourselves about ourselves, and he concludes that our current narrative “is simply not credible.” The author highlights familiar historical events and characters: Pericles, Socrates, Julius Caesar, Jesus, Charlemagne, Machiavelli, Martin Luther, Cortés, Galileo. He recognizes the immense influence of Christianity on western culture, but he may put off non-Christians with his presentation of Jesus Christ’s ascension into Heaven as fact rather than belief. He very broadly traces the contribution of artists and writers through the ages and notes the great influence of African-American musicians on the culture of their country. (Women, however, have a very minor role here.) Osborne—an Englishman—blasts the U.S., most notably for what he calls the genocide of Native Americans and for slavery and its aftermath. He believes our evolving culture of militarism and our belief that our political systems are superior to all others are among the world’s great dangers. The paradox he sees: The more rational we try to be, the more deadly the result.
Incomplete.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2006
ISBN: 1-933648-19-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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
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