Some arresting reminders of our political past—would that Levin’s prose featured some of the fire flaring from his...
A conservative journalist traces our current sharp political schism back to the writings of conservative Edmund Burke (1729–1797) and liberal Thomas Paine (1738–1809).
Despite his conservative credentials, National Affairs founder and editor Levin (Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy, 2008) maintains a generally disinterested balance throughout—although at times it reads like an earnest term paper from a talented, assiduous student: standard comparison-contrast organization, lots of lengthy block quotations. He begins by noting how Burke and Paine first met (they dined together in 1788), their early amiable relations and their later fierce exchanges in print. Levin then provides a biographical sketch of each (adding more as the argument advances) before commencing to compare their philosophical and political positions. Paine, he shows, believed in man as a natural creature—and that governments should be more consistent with his nature and should rest on principles derived from reason. Burke, by contrast, argued that we must learn from the past, continue what works and gradually change what doesn’t. These two basic approaches reoccur throughout the other topics Levin discusses: justice (the two men had very different notions of equality), obligation (Paine believed choice was more important), reason and prescription, revolution and reform, and our obligations to all generations, not just to the new, revolutionary one. Concluding, Levin chides both sides in today’s acrimonious climate, pointing out weaknesses in their positions and emphases. The author has done a tremendous amount of research and seems to have read every major work by both figures, doing his best both to state their positions clearly (and fairly) and to note their relevance in today’s America. He consigns to endnotes some of the subtleties and ambiguities of their positions.
Some arresting reminders of our political past—would that Levin’s prose featured some of the fire flaring from his principals’ pens.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-465-05097-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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