Lively, opinionated, and dense with detail, Magnusson's tome belongs on the shelves of anyone interested in matters Scottish.
Almost as weighty as the Stone of Destiny, this vast, superb history relates Scotland's past over a dozen millennia.
Devotees of BBC America and the History Channel may know Magnusson, familiar on UK airwaves as a historian of the British Isles. The Icelandic transplant, an archaeologist and prolific author (The Vikings, 2001, etc.) and translator (The Fish Can Sing, 2001, etc.), has a greater sense of Scottish history than do most natives. He is thus admirably suited to the difficult task of condensing Scotland's history—made dauntingly complicated by family rivalries, contending clans, and ceaseless tensions with sometime-conqueror, England—into a coherent narrative. Magnusson begins by promising to undo a few “cherished conceptions” about Scottish history, while advancing a few of his own. Along the way he considers such oddities as whether the tartan is a comparatively modern invention and whether Macbeth and Thorfinn the Mighty, the Norse earl of Orkney, might not have been one and the same. More seriously, he closely examines the effects of the 18th-century union with England and the cost and benefits to both countries, and the apparent inability of Scots throughout history to unite without betraying one another. Magnusson takes care to set events on the ground, giving driving directions to the remotest places, so that readers can see battlegrounds and ruins for themselves, and he lingers over curious artifacts (for instance, a box made of the wood from a great tree called Wallace's Oak and given to George Washington, “the Wallace of America”). His narrative ends in 1999, when a Scottish parliament convened for the first time in almost 300 years, and the legend-shrouded Stone of Destiny was returned to Edinburgh from Westminster Abbey—whereupon, Magnusson wryly remarks, this talisman of Scottish nationhood “lost all its potency as a symbol and became just another ordinary and undistinguished chunk of rock.”
Lively, opinionated, and dense with detail, Magnusson's tome belongs on the shelves of anyone interested in matters Scottish.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-798-4
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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