An intelligent, understanding, critical, if ultimately admiring study of Elizabeth II and her age, by a Whitbread Prizewinning British historian (Hugh Dalton, not reviewed). When Elizabeth was born, in 1926, there was little expectation that she would be monarch. She was the daughter of the duke of York, George V's second son. The prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) was the clear successor. The turbulent, unsettling sequence of events that led to her accession—the abdication of Edward, the heroic role played by her father (then George VI) in WW II, the storybook quality of her romance with Philip, and her coronation- -contributed to her being subject to ``adulation unparalleled since the days of Louis XIV.'' The underlying theme of this book is how this all changed, despite the remarkable job she herself has done. Pimlott carefully argues that Elizabth, who at first relied heavily on her courtiers, gradually assumed more and more control of the monarchy, becoming at last a cool, confident professional, deeply interested in politics and in her people, legendary for her energy and patience. As to the decline of interest in royalty, Pimlott suggests a number of factors having relatively little to do with the queen herself, including the antics of the younger generation of royals, the intrusiveness of the press, the decline in respect for institutions, the transfer of British interests to Europe rather than the Commonwealth. Reflecting the greater openness that now characterizes discussion of the royals, Pimlott tartly notes, for instance, that the union of Charles and Diana was ``a marriage of convenience that was disguised to everybody, including themselves, as a lovematch.'' He concludes with a paradox: ``a pilloried family, a much criticized institution, even a widely questioned role—and yet, a valued incumbent.'' He is, perhaps, exaggerating the institution's difficulties. But no one has analyzed these problems with greater acuteness or more sense. (69 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1997
ISBN: 0-471-19431-X
Page Count: 668
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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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