A quick, smoothly readable account of Lincoln the political striver, the embodiment of the Declaration’s “central idea…that...
The editor of the National Review sketches the political character of our 16th president.
Ever since his assassination and swift elevation to the pantheon of our greatest presidents, “getting right with Lincoln,” in the memorable phrase of one historian, has been the business of our mainstream politicians. As they grope to align themselves with Lincoln’s legacy, unembarrassed by any “ideological body snatching,” much mischief ensues. To discover what Lincoln truly believed, Lowry (Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years, 2009, etc.) confines himself largely to Lincoln's pre-presidential career, explaining how the backwoods boy of little schooling and negligible property early on identified with the Whigs rather than the Jacksonian Democrats who captured so many of his similarly situated peers. The Rail-Splitter, he argues, is best understood not as a man of the axe but of the book, not so much by his origins as by his aspirations. For the deeply ambitious Lincoln, enhancing opportunity was the animating principle of his politics, and he committed himself to a program of uplift and improvement that offered the best chance for his fellow citizens to transcend their upbringings. Personally, Lincoln avoided most vices, and he preached and exemplified the habits of self-control, rationality and industriousness. Politically, he elevated the value of work, held property sacrosanct and looked to the Founding Fathers as a guide for renewing an American spirit gone flabby. Lowry sets out Lincoln’s platform: enthusiastic support for economic growth, internal improvements, new technologies, education and a sound national banking system; a profound respect for our constitutional system and free institutions; and a refusal to engage in class warfare, to sentimentalize agrarianism or to denigrate achievement. Some readers are bound to accuse Lowry of nudging Lincoln into the author’s own preferred categories of belief, but they’ll be hard-pressed to find any violation of the historical record.
A quick, smoothly readable account of Lincoln the political striver, the embodiment of the Declaration’s “central idea…that every man can make himself.”Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-212378-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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