Uplifting, entertaining history.
Genghis Khan as the first feminist patriarch.
Weatherford (Anthropology/Macalester Coll.; Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 2004, etc.) asserts that the founder of the Mongol Empire learned from harsh experience not to trust the men within the warring steppe clans, and eventually left his extended empire in the hands of his more capable daughters. Their husbands and in-laws, in turn, savagely wrested power from the women, excised their existence from official accounts and left the empire in alarming decline over centuries—until the reign of the last great Mongol queen Manduhai the Wise, who restored Mongol power in the 15th century and drove back the incursions by the Chinese. In the first part of the book, Weatherford traces the life of Genghis Khan and his relationship with his children, probably four sons and seven or eight daughters, as later recorded in The Secret History of the Mongols in the 13th century. This document sets forth the patriarch’s intentions for his family and nation, but it is curiously missing the part of the text that completes this intriguing sentence: “Let us reward our female offspring.” Weatherford argues that Genghis maintained a staunch adherence to a male-female sharing of power. Girls were raised to ride and shoot like boys, and they were expected to rule a territory as rigorously as they ruled the home. As part of his strategy to tighten his hold along the Silk Route, Genghis married his daughters to leaders in recently vanquished foreign lands to rule in his stead. Weatherford amply demonstrates how subsequent male relations waged a backlash against these women rulers until the remarkable rise of Manduhai and her ability to reunite the squabbling Mongol tribes.
Uplifting, entertaining history.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-40715-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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