A magic-carpet conducted by a genial, learned host.
Details in the noted Dutch artist’s paintings lead readers through doorways into the period when the world was becoming increasingly interconnected.
Brook (Chinese Studies/Oxford Univ.; Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China, 2005, etc.) begins several decades ago, when he crashed his bicycle near Delft. This happy accident led to his initial viewing of Vermeer’s grave in a local church, and eventually to this book. The author’s narrative strategy is effective and illuminating. He first discusses Vermeer’s View of Delft, directing attention to the roofline of the Dutch East India Company—from which Brook advances the interesting story of the company’s history and its major role in early globalization. The eponymous chapter, perhaps the book’s strongest, uses Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl to describe and analyze the North American beaver trade. The officer sports a large hat made of felt, which was manufactured from the beaver’s underfur. Brook enriches the scene with background material on relations between indigenous North Americans and the rapacious invaders, which inevitably led to bloodshed. (A graphic description of a ritual torture makes rough reading.) Subsequent chapters range over vast geographical and cultural terrain, examining objects and people in paintings by Vermeer and a few contemporaries, stressing throughout their global implications. In such fashion, we learn much—occasionally too much—about Chinese porcelain, Delft pottery, globes, Jesuits and Dominicans in China, the differences between Chinese and European soups, the tobacco and opium trades, African slavery, the emergence of silver as the most desired metal and the spread of prized objects around the shrinking globe.
A magic-carpet conducted by a genial, learned host.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59691-444-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A timely and impassioned argument for social justice.
Profound contrasts in policing and incarceration reveal disparate Americas.
MSNBC host and editor at large of the Nation, Hayes (Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, 2013, etc.) expands the investigation of inequality begun in his previous book by focusing on law and order. Offering a persuasive analysis, he distinguishes between the Nation, inhabited by the “affluent, white, elite,” and the Colony, largely urban, poor, “overwhelmingly black and brown” but increasingly including working-class whites. The criminal justice system, argues Hayes, is vastly different for each: “One (the Nation) is the kind of policing regime you expect in a democracy; the other (the Colony) is the kind you expect in an occupied land.” In the Colony, “real democratic accountability is lacking and police behave like occupying soldiers in restive and dangerous territory.” Law enforcement, as noted by law professor Seth Stoughton, takes a “warrior worldview” in which “officers are locked in intermittent and unpredictable combat with unknown but highly lethal enemies.” Acknowledging that America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, Hayes traces the country’s history of punishment to the experience of European settlers who, “outnumbered and afraid,” responded with violence. Between 1993 and 2014, although the crime rate declined significantly, most Americans feel that crime has increased and therefore support aggressive police action. Furthermore, although most crime occurs intraracially, the Nation believes that the Colony is a constant, insidious threat; unmistakably, “we have moved the object of our concern from crime to criminals, from acts to essences.” Among other rich democracies, ours is the only one with the death penalty. Whereas in Europe, humane treatment has been widely instituted, in the U.S., perpetrators are treated as unredeemable. “The American justice system is all about wrath and punishment,” the author asserts. Arguing for the erasure of borders between Nation and Colony, Hayes admits, regretfully, that such change might fundamentally alter the comfortable sense of order that he, and other members of the Nation, prizes.
A timely and impassioned argument for social justice.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-25422-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
An educational and inspiring biography of seminal American innovators.
A charmingly pared-down life of the “boys” that grounds their dream of flight in decent character and work ethic.
There is a quiet, stoical awe to the accomplishments of these two unprepossessing Ohio brothers in this fluently rendered, skillfully focused study by two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning and two-time National Book Award–winning historian McCullough (The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, 2011, etc.). The author begins with a brief yet lively depiction of the Wright home dynamic: reeling from the death of their mother from tuberculosis in 1889, the three children at home, Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine, had to tend house, as their father, an itinerant preacher, was frequently absent. McCullough highlights the intellectual stimulation that fed these bookish, creative, close-knit siblings. Wilbur was the most gifted, yet his parents’ dreams of Yale fizzled after a hockey accident left the boy with a mangled jaw and broken teeth. The boys first exhibited their mechanical genius in their print shop and then in their bicycle shop, which allowed them the income and space upstairs for machine-shop invention. Dreams of flight were reawakened by reading accounts by Otto Lilienthal and other learned treatises and, specifically, watching how birds flew. Wilbur’s dogged writing to experts such as civil engineer Octave Chanute and the Smithsonian Institute provided advice and response, as others had long been preoccupied by controlled flight. Testing their first experimental glider took the Wrights over several seasons to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to experiment with their “wing warping” methods. There, the strange, isolated locals marveled at these most “workingest boys,” and the brothers continually reworked and repaired at every step. McCullough marvels at their success despite a lack of college education, technical training, “friends in high places” or “financial backers”—they were just boys obsessed by a dream and determined to make it reality.
An educational and inspiring biography of seminal American innovators.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2874-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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