“In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.” So begins Dante’s Divine Comedy; for many modern readers, this trip through the afterlife never gets any straighter. Biographer, novelist and critic Wilson (Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II, 2008, etc.) aims to change this with his new book, intended as both an inducement and introduction to the greatest of all epic poems.
On balance, it works splendidly. There may be no easy way to explain the fractious 13th-century Italy factions that dominated the life of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), and the fact-crammed early chapters devoted to the church-state strife between Guelfs and Ghibellines and Whites and Blacks can be slow going. Wilson is stronger in his focus on the poet’s mysterious inner life: married to a woman, Gemma Donati, he never mentioned, and obsessed by a woman, Beatrice Portinari, he barely knew. Beatrice, who serves as Dante’s guide through heaven, was an object of both love and desire, and with her death in her early 20s, she became to Dante the very emblem of God’s perfection and love. Love was the subject of the age, for Dante no less than the other leading intellectual and artistic lights of his era. “Dante believed that Love encompassed all things, that it was the force that moved the sun and other stars,” writes the author. Wilson also explains the tradition of courtly love that Dante reacted against, his fascination with numerology and astrology; and he addresses the competing views and multiple interpretations of Dante’s poem. Despite the occasional awkward metaphor—e.g., Dante’s “reworking of his own story is pregnant with dogs in the night-time who do not bark”—Wilson writes with crisp, conversational fluency. He’s a fine tour guide, never failing to throw light on this dark wood.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-13468-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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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