Livelier and less scholarly than Alister McGrath’s In the Beginning (2001): an engaging work of literary, cultural, and...
British travel writer Nicolson (Sea Room, 2002, etc.) anatomizes the creation of the 1611 English-language Bible, perhaps the only work of art ever made by a committee.
But what a committee it was: made up some of the finest poets, translators, and scholars in the thoroughly well educated realm of King James I. The Bible that they produced with their collective wisdom and skill, James hoped, would settle dissent on any number of fronts, binding together the dissident branches of the still-new Church of England, calming Puritan disquietude, perhaps even helping bring about a reconciliation of some kind with the Catholic Church. “Money and happiness would dance together through the increasingly elegant streets of London,” writes Nicolson, and “James’s Arcadian vision of untroubled togetherness would descend on the soul of the land like a balm.” No such thing happened, of course; dissent and disunity continued unabated and would soon spill over into civil war. But in the meanwhile, tucked away in their warrens, the makers of James’s Bible produced an elegant and indeed unifying tapestry made of scattered Latin, Hebrew, and Greek texts, debating (in Latin, with learned Greek asides) over such matters as whether Launcelot Andrewes’s “face” was quite the right word in the stirring passage “and darknesse was vpon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God mooued vpon the face of the waters.” Having a broad scene to paint, Nicolson takes his time building up to the work of the great translators and writers under James’s commission, offering a vivid picture of Jacobite London and its many roiling arguments—not least of them concerning the Englishing of biblical words such as ecclesia and presbyteros, on which “the entire meaning of the Reformation hinges.”
Livelier and less scholarly than Alister McGrath’s In the Beginning (2001): an engaging work of literary, cultural, and religious history.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-018516-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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