Few original insights but fine biographies.
The latest addition to the relatively new genre of dual biographies of Founding Fathers.
Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Larson (History and Law/Pepperdine Univ.; To the Edges of the Earth: 1909, the Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration, 2018) writes that both Benjamin Franklin and George Washington rose to prominence in the 1750s during the French and Indian War. Already in his 50s, Franklin had grown wealthy in the printing business, retired to make a worldwide reputation as a scientist, and become a power in Pennsylvania politics. Three decades younger, Washington used family connections to obtain a Virginia military command. More through luck and self-promotion than competence, he became a nationally known military figure. During this period, the two met in Philadelphia several times and exchanged letters relating to the war. There followed nearly 20 years apart. Sent to England in 1757 to represent Pennsylvania’s and then the Colonies’ interests, Franklin traveled back and forth until 1775. Washington married a rich widow, became a wealthy planter, and served in the Virginia House of Burgesses. Franklin returned to join the second Continental Congress in May 1775. During the six weeks before Washington left to command the army, they worked together, but details are scant. Franklin sailed to France, where he remained until 1785, lobbying for French aid. He and Washington exchanged a few letters. Their closest interactions came during the 1787 Constitutional Convention where they (with James Madison) were the most influential figures. Larson’s Washington is not the traditional passive father figure but rather an energetic proponent of a strong presidency. Franklin believed the final product gave the president too much power, but he supported it anyway. Despite Larson’s efforts, few readers will fail to note that the pair were never a close-knit team (à la Washington/Hamilton or Jefferson/Madison) or rivals (à la Jefferson/Adams or Jefferson/Hamilton) but national icons who knew and respected each other. To call them partners is a stretch.
Few original insights but fine biographies.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-288015-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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