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BUDAPEST

PORTRAIT OF A CITY BETWEEN EAST AND WEST

A beautifully wrought, admiring portrait of a beloved, beleaguered city and its people.

A satisfying history of a city that, “after London, Paris, and Rome…receives more tourists than any other capital in Europe.”

London-based journalist Sebestyen, author of Lenin and Revolution 1989, was an infant when his Hungarian family fled the city after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a cataclysmic event he chronicled in his 2006 book, Twelve Days. His evident love for the city emerges clearly in this engaging chronological account, and he provides a cleareyed sense of the “characteristic Hungarian pessimism.” Over the centuries, the strategic geopolitical locations of Buda and Pest, on either of the Danube, had drawn the attention of conquering armies, from the Romans to the early marauding Magyars, the Ottomans, Austrians, Nazis, and Soviets. Throughout his sweeping history, the author emphasizes the recurrent theme that the city often had to stand alone against these onslaughts. The Ottomans ruled for 150 years and left lasting legacies, such as the coffeehouse, and they mostly tolerated a large Jewish population in Pest. As religious wars in Europe heated up, Hungarian royals “threw in their lot” with the ultra-Catholic Austrian Hapsburgs, bestowing favors and titles on a few mega-loyal families who would come to dominate in decades to come. Nationalism drove the valiant but ultimately doomed first Hungarian Revolution of 1848, yet during the Austrian backlash, Jews were awarded unprecedented liberties. “Nowhere in Middle Europe,” writes the author, “did Jews play such a prominent part in modernization as in Hungary—in industry, commerce, banking, the professions.” The combining of the two parts of the city and replacement of the German language with Hungarian also fueled national pride. Despite being on the wrong side of both world wars and siding closely with Hitler, the Hungarians gained the world’s sympathy with what Sebestyen calls “the defining moment of the Cold War”—standing up to the Soviet army in 1956.

A beautifully wrought, admiring portrait of a beloved, beleaguered city and its people.

Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023

ISBN: 9780593317563

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 27, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023

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GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

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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HOW ELITES ATE THE SOCIAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT

Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.

A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.

Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.

Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.

Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023

ISBN: 9781668016015

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023

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