Engrossing retelling of an extraordinary life, correcting many popular misconceptions.
Probing biography of a woman who did a lot more than whistle a happy tune.
Anna Leonowens (1831–1915) became famous decades after her death as the well-born, gently bred governess in Margaret Landon’s 1944 bestseller, Anna and the King of Siam. Seven years later, Rodgers and Hammerstein transformed her story into the blockbuster Broadway musical, The King and I. Both versions of Leonowens’s life were partial and not terribly accurate, notes Morgan (English/Miami Univ; Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women’s Travel Writings About Southeast Asia, 1996, etc.). This wasn’t very surprising, however, since she invented and reinvented her own character as it suited her over the years. Morgan gives us the real woman, born Anna Harriet Edwards to a mixed-race teenage mother and a British soldier in the lowest ranks of the Indian army. Anna Harriet ran wild in the cantonments of multicultural Bombay before marrying Thomas Leon Owens, a clerk who took her to Australia and then to Malaysia before leaving her a widow with two small children in 1859. Leonowens arrived in Singapore six weeks later with a refurbished surname and a brand-new identity as a Caucasian, aristocratic English lady—just the sort the local gentry wanted to instruct their offspring. She went to work for King Mongkut of Siam in 1862, but the most famous portion of her life lasted only five years; by 1867, she had disembarked in New York to begin another career as an anti-slavery lecturer and author. “Appreciating the sheer inclusiveness of Anna’s varied life,” Morgan writes, “means trading in a narrow view of biography as a matter of individual achievement for a wider vision of the historical and personal range that composes even one individual’s history.” While her prose may occasionally be overly academic for the lay reader, Morgan paints a satisfying, multifaceted portrait.
Engrossing retelling of an extraordinary life, correcting many popular misconceptions.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-520-25226-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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
© 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.
