An exciting, detailed account of man versus adversity.
Call him crazy but determined: the story of Australian adventurer Cope (Off the Rails: Moscow to Beijing on Recumbent Bikes, 2004), who jettisoned his bike for a horse to gallop across Mongolia.
The author’s 2004 horseback trip from Mongolia to Hungary, 6,000 miles, was supposed to take 18 months but dragged on for three years. Cope aimed to recapture some of the magical freedom he imagined still existed for the nomads of the Mongolian steppes, descendants of Genghis Khan and his marauding empire. The author was also determined to dispel the stereotypes prevalent among Russians and others that Mongolians were barbaric and uncivilized and their existence more backward than the peoples of the neighboring societies. In a sensitive account both personal and historical, Cope delineates the nuts and bolts of such a daunting equine adventure: procuring the necessary horses (several sets of them, as Mongolian horses could not be removed from the country), and learning to ride and care for them properly, along with a great deal of research about the Mongolian empire and the life of the herding nomads (e.g., the return of the Tatars to the Crimea since their removal during World War II). The author even learned some Mongolian and Russian. Cope invited his share of hardships, which came from camping out in the wilderness, at full mercy of the elements, horse thieves and wolves, among other daily perils. Though he (and for the first two months, his girlfriend) relied on the generosity of the nomads and their extraordinary sense of hospitality, navigating the borders set him back mightily. The author infuses his ambitious account with the stories of the people and tales of the animals who inspired the journey, rendering the book heartfelt and memorable.
An exciting, detailed account of man versus adversity.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-072-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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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