A painstakingly researched portrait of the political landscape as the country inched toward civil war.
The second installment of the acclaimed historian and former Clinton adviser’s massive study of Abraham Lincoln delves into his deeply cerebral “wilderness years” out of the political spotlight.
After his one term as Illinois Congressman, Lincoln returned from Washington to Springfield in 1849 to practice law, wondering whether his political days were over. Yet as former Washington Post and New Yorker reporter Blumenthal (A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. I, 1809-1849, 2016, etc.) delineates in this minutely researched biography, Lincoln's political career was entering a latent but potent period, marked by intellectual study and writing and keen observation of alarming political developments such as the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Always a Whig in politics until then, the provincial lawyer was angered by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, largely by the efforts of Illinois Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, in favor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Blumenthal records the excruciating nuances in the events unfolding during these fraught years, including the surprisingly anti-slavery views of the Mexican War general Zachary Taylor and his equally surprising sudden death by cholera; the landslide presidential victory in 1852 of the young, impressionable Franklin Pierce, successfully manipulated by Douglas and Jefferson Davis, war secretary and “acting president of the United States”; the passing of the old order of Lincoln’s heroes Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun; passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; and the collapse of the Whig Party into the new Republican Party. As the author chronicles, all of this conspired to bring Lincoln back into the fray. Blumenthal also reveals the extent of Lincoln’s intellectual study during this time and how he began “shadowing” Douglas in framing his anti-slavery speeches. This period of dormancy would explode with the realignment of the Whig Party by Free Democrats, Free Soilers, and Know Nothings and would climax with the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 (presumably to be covered in Blumenthal’s next installment).
A painstakingly researched portrait of the political landscape as the country inched toward civil war.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5378-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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