Next book

MULTITUDES

HOW CROWDS MADE THE MODERN WORLD

Ideological bias undercuts some interesting analysis.

An examination of the rich history of crowds in entertainment, sports, and politics.

A crowd can free people from restrictive social norms while creating a different, temporary set of connections, states Hancox, a London-based freelance journalist and author of The Village Against the World. He argues that crowds allow us to “embrace a bit of chaos in life: to let ourselves go with the flow of the crowd, in order to be more truly ourselves.” This engaging message seems persuasive as Hancox explores carnivals, soccer games, mosh pits, and other examples of crowds. Other parts of the text, however, appear to be primarily vehicles for Hancox’s ideological views; too often it seems he is selecting and shaping evidence rather than letting it speak for itself. For example, he frequently refers to French polymath Gustave Le Bon, who examined his country’s revolutionary violence in a book called The Crowd (1895) and concluded that crowds could easily turn into mobs and therefore had to be controlled. Hancox thoroughly disagrees and makes a fair case for his negative assessment, but devoting so much of his time to arguing with a book published in 1895 looks suspiciously like setting up an ancient straw man instead of providing contemporary examples of fallacious criticisms of crowds. Indeed, Hancox’s position seems to be that crowds connected to liberal or progressive issues are vibrant, articulate demonstrations of democracy, while those connected to right-wing causes are quasi-fascist mobs. He investigates an interesting phenomenon and offers a host of colorful anecdotes, but not all readers will want to wade through his left-leaning politics to find them.

Ideological bias undercuts some interesting analysis.

Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024

ISBN: 9781804294482

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Verso

Review Posted Online: June 28, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

Next book

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

Next book

GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

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

Close Quickview