A fine biography of a significant environmental champion.
A biography of a 19th-century naturalist who worked tirelessly on behalf of America’s wilderness and Native American rights.
Beginning in 1870, with his first trip west, George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938) evolved into one of the most prominent conservationists in America, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and many native tribal leaders. He campaigned to establish national parks, the Audubon Society, and the New York Zoological Society; edited the long-running journal Forest and Stream; founded the Boone and Crockett Club, whose mission it was to preserve large game; and published many ethnographies of Plains tribes. Drawing on 40,000 pages of correspondence, 50 diaries and notebooks, and an unfinished autobiography, Taliaferro (All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt, 2013, etc.) thoroughly—and with due admiration—documents the life of “a man of worthy causes.” He acknowledges, however, the limitations of his sources: “Possibly Grinnell was simply too busy and proper to indulge in self-reflection. Or was there something he wanted to avoid reflecting upon?” Although the author hints at “secrets,” he reveals little about Grinnell’s intimate relationships with friends and family, including his wife, whom he suddenly married in 1902. A photographer, she energetically accompanied him on his trips west, where he exulted in freedom from the commercial world of New York and experienced the “magnificent drama” of events such as the Pawnee buffalo hunt: “the most momentous, the most defining experience” of Grinnell’s life. “There is something rather horrible in the wild and savage excitement that one feels under such circumstances,” he said of another hunt. Taliaferro portrays Grinnell evenhandedly as a man of his time: Seeing the oppression suffered by Native Americans, Grinnell urged recognition that they “are humans like ourselves”; still, he “hewed to the prevailing anthropological wisdom that Indians were only midway up the ladder from savagery to civilization.” Grinnell’s life, Taliaferro aptly concludes, “was a study in romanticism, evolution, and progressivism.”
A fine biography of a significant environmental champion.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-013-2
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
PROFILES
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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