Oft-told stories about people as familiar as family still retain their power to animate and educate.
Popular historian Ronald (The Sancy Blood Diamond, 2004, etc.) struggles mightily to find a fresh promontory from which to observe Elizabeth I’s favorite rovers: John Hawkins, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, the Earl of Essex.
They helped fill her coffers, weaken Spain, lay the foundation for Britain’s empire. Is there anything new to say about these celebrated folks and their often execrable behavior? This author’s success is moderate. Her framework is the oft-told biography of the Virgin Queen. Ronald quickly assesses the sorry economic and geopolitical state of the country in 1558, when young Elizabeth assumed the throne. The country needed cash, and Spanish treasure ships were queued up across the Atlantic delivering the bounties of the New World. Enter those aforementioned English pirates. Ronald offers the biography of each, narrates the necessary adventures, pauses periodically to quote (sometimes at excessive length) from relevant documents or to sketch biographical, political and geographical background. She rehearses a bit of the story of the first successful English slave trader, John Hawkins (for much more, see Nick Hazlewood’s The Queen’s Slave Trader, 2004). Then the text, like Elizabethan history itself, comes alive with Francis Drake swaggering onto the stage and quite literally stealing his way into the queen’s heart. Ronald chronicles Drake’s voyages with confidence, knowledge and patent admiration for his naval skills: At one point she describes him as “one hell of a captain and navigator.” Eventually, he circumnavigated the globe, defeated the Spanish Armada, sort of retired, died. Mary, Queen of Scots, Essex and Raleigh lost their heads, but by the time James I mounted the throne in 1603, England was poised for global greatness. What will certainly strike many readers is Elizabeth’s serial dissembling—lying was one of her greatest talents—and the use by all European powers of deception, theft and violence as their principal instruments in the cacophonous symphony of international relations.
Oft-told stories about people as familiar as family still retain their power to animate and educate.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-082066-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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
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