An exhaustive portrait of the man responsible for shining a light on the lives of the poor in late-19th-century New York...
Solid though blandly written biography of the pioneering investigative journalist.
Buk-Swienty (Journalism/Univ. of Southern Denmark) recounts the remarkable story of how Jacob Riis (1849–1914) rose from humble beginnings in Denmark, arrived in the United States virtually penniless and after a series of odd jobs became a reporter specializing in crime and poverty. His seminal work, How the Other Half Lives, is still read today, offering a demonstration of how much worse things were a hundred years ago for those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. Though generally admiring, the book does not gloss over its subject’s flaws, which included a weakness for sensationalist prose, a hefty ego and prejudiced attitudes toward blacks and Jews. “Riis was a typical Victorian moralist who would never have dreamed of questioning the superiority of Christian values and who saw himself as superior to people of color,” Buk-Swienty writes. The author goes on to chronicle the reporter’s collaborations with Theodore Roosevelt and other like-minded reformers to improve housing, health and sanitary conditions in New York City’s tenements. Riis opened Roosevelt’s eyes to the conditions endured by the truly needy and helped reinforce some of the future president’s already strong progressive instincts. While it doesn’t break much new ground, this admirable biography will reintroduce Riis to modern readers, many of whom know him only from passing references in history books. Unfortunately, the book’s appeal is limited by Buk-Swienty’s uninspired prose (assuming it’s fairly translated) and poor organizational skills. He has a tendency to go off on tangents like a two-page discourse on the history of photography, and he spends nearly 100 pages on Riis’s early life before getting to his more important years as a journalist.
An exhaustive portrait of the man responsible for shining a light on the lives of the poor in late-19th-century New York City.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06023-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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
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