Manchester, temporarily putting aside his rousing Churchill series (The Last Lion), offers a disappointing retread of past histories about the explosive dawn of the modern age. For Manchester, the Middle Ages were a period of unrelieved superstition, corruption, violence, anti-intellectualism, and intolerance. The worst offenders were the Popes, particularly those ruling on the brink of the Protestant Reformation, whose catalogue of sins included assassination plots, simony, and nepotism. Their indulgence in fornication is described here with almost lip-smacking salaciousness (Alexander VI, the Borgia Pope, is pictured as making love with one woman when he suddenly spies her naked daughter, whose "rhythmic rotation of the hips...so intrigued [him] that he switched partners in midstroke"). Manchester's heroes include Leonardo da Vinci, Luther, and Erasmus; still, in attempting to paint the twilight of an old order in bold colors, he has lost all sense of nuance, acknowledging only in a sentence the Church's role in stabilizing Europe after the Roman Empire collapsed, and picturing the Middle Ages—which produced Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Dante, Chaucer, and the builders of Chartres—as altogether bad. Manchester has not forgotten the skills that, with invective, eloquence, and anecdote, make him a master storyteller. Yet, by his own admission, he did not master any recent scholarship on the early 16th century, which dooms him to retelling the same old stories recounted countless times before. The book Manchester could have written is glimpsed briefly only in the last quarter here, when he transforms Ferdinand Magellan into a paradigm of the tragic hero he celebrated in his works on JFK, Douglas MacArthur, and Churchill. Disheartening: a "portrait" painted in simplified strokes and with no perspective.
Pub Date: May 10, 1992
ISBN: 0-316-54531-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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