A nimbly written, satisfyingly detailed survey, suggesting new directions in considering the Victorian era.
A lively examination of the influence of foreign intellectuals in Victorian England—seen here as both more cosmopolitan and less strait-laced than our popular conceptions generally allow.
Christiansen (Paris Babylon, 1995) notes 19th-century English society was receptive to a very wide variety of cultural influences, whose impact he examines in six long essays. In one, he depicts the painter Théodore Géricault as a fragile youth tormented by dreams of artistic fame and driven to find an audience in London—which, to a large degree, he did (his famous Raft of the “Medusa” caused a sensation when it was exhibited in Piccadilly in 1820). The composer Richard Wagner, also motivated by his stalled career, was less enthralled by repeated visits to the British capital, wondering aloud whether “anything [is] more repugnant than the real genuine Englishman.” Although Christiansen suggests the London music establishment found Wagner “exasperating” (or worse) in return, he notes that “In 1855 Wagner’s music had been freakish, marginal; by 1877 it assumed a central position in . . . Victorian culture.” By contrast, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1847 voyage from America is portrayed as a personal journey meant to assuage his own deep spiritual melancholy. Emerson lectured frequently, however, and he was sufficiently well-received that his journal (English Traits) became a bestseller and his transcendentalist philosophy soon took root in Victorian thought. Later chapters explore how seemingly frivolous trends instigated by particular foreigners—American “spirit rappers” (mediums), Australian cricketers, and Italian purveyors of “exotic dancing” (essentially ballet)—took on a popular resonance that outlasted the Victorian era and entered the mainstream of British cultural life.
A nimbly written, satisfyingly detailed survey, suggesting new directions in considering the Victorian era.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-790-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
Not flawless, but one of the best recent analyses of the contemporary woes of American economics and politics.
Remarkably comprehensive and coherent analysis of and prescriptions for America’s contemporary economic malaise by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Smith (Rethinking America, 1995, etc.).
“Over the past three decades,” writes the author, “we have become Two Americas.” We have arrived at a new Gilded Age, where “gross inequality of income and wealth” have become endemic. Such inequality is not simply the result of “impersonal and irresistible market forces,” but of quite deliberate corporate strategies and the public policies that enabled them. Smith sets out on a mission to trace the history of these strategies and policies, which transformed America from a roughly fair society to its current status as a plutocracy. He leaves few stones unturned. CEO culture has moved since the 1970s from a concern for the general well-being of society, including employees, to the single-minded pursuit of personal enrichment and short-term increases in stock prices. During much of the ’70s, CEO pay was roughly 40 times a worker’s pay; today that number is 367. Whether it be through outsourcing and factory closings, corporate reneging on once-promised contributions to employee health and retirement funds, the deregulation of Wall Street and the financial markets, a tax code which favors overwhelmingly the interests of corporate heads and the superrich—all of which Smith examines in fascinating detail—the American middle class has been left floundering. For its part, government has simply become an enabler and partner of the rich, as the rich have turned wealth into political influence and rigid conservative opposition has created the politics of gridlock. What, then, is to be done? Here, Smith’s brilliant analyses turn tepid, as he advocates for “a peaceful political revolution at the grassroots” to realign the priorities of government and the economy but offers only the vaguest of clues as to how this might occur.
Not flawless, but one of the best recent analyses of the contemporary woes of American economics and politics.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6966-8
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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