The life of Gertrude Bell (18681926)—bluestocking, Oxfordian, orientalist—told in mind-addling detail by Wallach (coauthor, The New Palestinians, 1992, etc.). This biography of Bell—Britain's woman in Mesopotamia during the early part of this century—is a near day-by-day account of her life, relying heavily on Bell's correspondence and diaries to set the tone of the narrative (long on intimacy, short on analysis). Wallach deploys the linear mode of historical storytelling: She opens with the Bell clan amassing their millions in the ironworks of Northumbria and closes with Bell's suicide. In between are her early years at the family manses Red Barns and Rounton Grange; her first-class degree in modern history from Oxford; her years abroad, always moving in diplomatic circles (the parties, the dress fittings, the search for a mate) until she gets her first taste of the East in Persia. Forget about men—though Wallach tries hard to insinuate them into the story as often as possible, it's clear from this moment on that Bell's destiny is not with a person but with a place, and that place is turn-of-the-century Syria, Arabia, and Mesopotamia. Money allowed her to ramble; she got to know the land and people and archaeology. And when called, she did her bit for the empire: spying on the Turks and Germans, giving T.E. Lawrence the lowdown on tribal ways, sweating away the war years in Baghdad and Basrah. As intimate advisor to Iraq's King Faisal, she whispered the colonial office's wishes into his ear. The rub here is in the details—too many, and they dampen, at times suffocate, the narrative: ``A cigarette and a cup of thick Turkish coffee at her side, she munched pistachio nuts and studied.'' From the swarm of particulars emerges a curious soul—hard traveler, hack for Empire, cosmopolite, iconoclast, anti-suffragist—a complex, absorbing character, long overdue for study. (30 b&w photos, 4 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 9, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-47408-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
