One of the nation’s darkest chapters, brilliantly exhumed and analyzed with due attention to its obvious contemporary...
Respected biographer Morris (Ambrose Bierce, 1996, etc.) reconstructs in amazing detail a presidential election that profaned the rule of law and nearly rekindled the Civil War.
A vivid past portrayer of such diverse Victorian personalities as General Phil Sheridan and Walt Whitman, the author here meticulously fleshes out the character and influences of the antagonists: Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican Governor of Ohio, and Democrat Samuel Tilden, Hayes’s counterpart from New York. The contest, in the country’s centennial year, pitted an affable born politician and bona fide war hero (Hayes) against a bookish, lifelong bachelor barrister who had once dropped out of Yale because he didn’t like the food. Morris lets the reader smell the corruption accrued over 16 years of Republican administration, indelibly tarred as “Grantism” even though the two-term president in 1876 had never been touched directly by scandal. The wounded South still festered under Reconstruction, which brought carpetbaggers into sway in legislatures vacated by disqualified rebels, plus regular visits by federal troops anytime things threatened to get violent. In those days, the Democrats were the reformist party, out to curtail the size and power of the federal government while the entrenched Republicans strove to preserve and enhance it. Blacks in the South were free by decree only: armed white intimidators waited at the polls, and some local codes enabled the arrest for vagrancy of any refusing to work for their former masters at subsistence wages. The negation of Tilden’s eventual 265,000-vote plurality devolved into three southern states with Republican governors, and the fraud progressed from Florida (even then) to Congress and the Electoral College. By the time Morris documents the entire process, with Hayes’s victory declared official in February, democracy seems as dead as Wild Bill Hickok, gunned down that August in Deadwood, South Dakota.
One of the nation’s darkest chapters, brilliantly exhumed and analyzed with due attention to its obvious contemporary relevance.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2386-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An authoritative guide leads an illuminating journey into the distant past.
A noted Egyptologist follows the search for burial sites.
Former director of the Egypt Exploration Society and president of the International Association of Egyptologists, Naunton has presented his research in several TV documentaries, most recently King Tut’s Tomb: The Hidden Chamber (2016). He makes his book debut with an insightful, informative, and beautifully illustrated overview of archaeologists’ quests to find the tombs of some of the most famous individuals of the ancient world—Imhotep, Nefertiti, Cleopatra, and the Macedonian leader Alexander the Great foremost among them—that so far have eluded discovery. Along with chronicling expeditions, Naunton provides colorful biographies of these major historical figures and the world they inhabited. The 19th-century craze for Egyptian antiquities resulted in major finds, but despite two centuries of efforts, much has not been revealed. Of the tombs that have been discovered over the years, the author notes that many have been found empty, plundered by robbers lusting after the considerable wealth buried with the mummified corpse. Some robberies, he speculates, were likely carried out by the same people who buried the deceased or by workers involved in the construction of a new tomb that opened accidentally into the old one. Naunton vividly describes the sumptuous riches of burial sites: In 1939, for example, a team under the direction of French archaeologist Pierre Montet discovered a royal tomb containing a “falcon-headed coffin of solid silver,” a solid gold funerary mask, a scarab of lapis lazuli, and objects made of other precious materials. The following year, his team discovered a mummy “wrapped in almost unimaginable riches,” including 22 bracelets, solid gold toe and finger rings, and jeweled weapons, amulets, and canes. While it seems mysterious that the tombs of famous individuals should remain hidden, Naunton suggests that ancient “waves of rebuilding,” sieges, geological changes, and recent redevelopment have caused sites to be obscured. The tomb of Cleopatra and, perhaps, Marc Antony, for example, may lie buried in the sea, off the coast of Alexandria.
An authoritative guide leads an illuminating journey into the distant past.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-500-05199-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© 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.
