More earnest than truculent, Jacoby writes for a readership of freethinkers, but believers who stumble upon the book will...
Veteran journalist Jacoby (Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age, 2011, etc.) pens less a biography than a series of sympathetic essays on the ideas of Robert Ingersoll (1833–1899), a Gilded-Age media superstar whose speeches entertained vast audiences even of those who disagreed with his agnosticism.
Enthusiastic followers included Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Eugene Debs, Thomas Edison, Clarence Darrow and W.C. Fields, yet he has largely vanished from history. At the same time, religion—in America uniquely among developed nations—remains almost universally respected and politically influential if sometimes distressingly anti-intellectual. Largely self-educated, Ingersoll passed the Illinois bar at age 21, rising in Republican state politics to become attorney general in 1867. Despite the atheism that put elective office out of reach, his brilliant oratory kept him influential in the party, whose deference to conservative Christian beliefs did not appear for another century. While Ingersoll’s atheism filled auditoriums and provoked outraged sermons and editorials, many public stances were far ahead of his time. He denounced racism, discrimination against blacks and anti-immigration laws. He spoke out for the equality of women—not merely for the vote which preoccupied activists at the time—but for birth control and equality in marriage, education and jobs: positions no man and few women of his generation advocated. Nineteenth-century unbelievers tended toward pseudo-scientific social Darwinism, but not Ingersoll, who supported social reforms, free public education and workers' rights.
More earnest than truculent, Jacoby writes for a readership of freethinkers, but believers who stumble upon the book will find it hard to deny that, irreligion aside, Ingersoll was a thoroughly admirable figure.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-13725-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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