A solid examination of how the Viking story continues to be told, embellished, and contested.
A lucid survey of Viking lore, archaeological finds, and modern interpretations.
Whittock has published numerous educational books, including studies of Viking and Anglo-Saxon history. In his latest, he focuses on 11th-century Viking settlements in North America and how the Viking legacy—in both fact and myth—continues to influence the U.S. today. The author demonstrates that medieval Norse sagas and modern archaeology have surprising confluences, though both remain open to debate and vulnerable to misuse. In the process, he assays claims for a Viking presence beyond the archaeological evidence from Newfoundland and the Canadian Arctic and tries to pinpoint the much-contested location of Vinland, possibly as far south as New England. Whittock investigates many bogus claims of Viking presence and artifacts, not least in the heavily Scandinavian U.S. Midwest. The author also parses the tug-of-war among the Vikings, Columbus, and the Mayflower Pilgrims for the mantle of “first Americans,” while reminding us that it’s nonsensical; only Native North American peoples hold that distinction. The book is authoritative in its details and engagingly written, and it’s unsettling in its examination of how Viking symbology is being co-opted, distorted, and perverted by white supremacist and other far-right extremist groups—some of it on display during the Jan. 6 insurrection. Especially topical from a European standpoint is the subject’s connection to the knotty roots of nationhood that underlie Russian nationalist claims denying Ukraine’s legitimacy as an independent nation. Whittock concludes with a survey of the enduring fascination with Viking lore in popular culture and in product marketing. If the book suffers from any shortcoming, it’s unnecessary reiteration. Though illustrative to a point, there is some padding here, with perhaps too much space devoted to the particulars of Viking-inspired comic books, movies, and TV series. Those are interesting subjects, but prove to be a diversion from the more scholarly content.
A solid examination of how the Viking story continues to be told, embellished, and contested.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781639365357
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
HISTORY | MILITARY | EXPEDITIONS | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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