A well-reasoned transoceanic rejoinder to Joanne B. Freeman’s Affairs of Honor (2001), and a pleasure for fans of Aubrey and...
“Thank God, I have done my duty,” quoth Lord Nelson moments before expiring in 1805 at the Battle of Trafalgar. In this vivid study, Nicolson (God’s Secretaries, 2003) examines the weight of those words.
Horatio Nelson was a kindly man in a violent time, uncouth and simple; the wife of an admiralty lord thought that his general appearance “was that of an idiot”—and this from an admirer—but his foes knew better than to discount him for his looks, for at the turn of the 19th century he was renowned for his fleet-crushing abilities, his willingness to shed his own men’s blood to gain advantage, and his careful enunciation of the doctrine of annihilation. Nelson saw himself, writes Nicolson, as an agent of apocalypse and divine retribution; he lived at a time when varieties of millennial religion were sweeping across England, particularly among the working class that made up the Royal Navy, and he took his religious ideas seriously while seeing to it that his fleets were confident, aggressive, and, by 1805, “the most effective maritime killing machine in the world.” Against them stood a Spanish navy that, while not useless, was badly served by its officers and crown, and a French navy that was divided along lines of class, region and ideology, so much so that it found it hard to fulfill the functions of a marine force—namely, keeping itself alive and afloat and constantly killing the enemy, as the British were doing to them in a ratio of ten to one. Technology played its role, Nicolson observes, but ideas and beliefs were as central, and though Trafalgar was a tactical mess, British ideology and values kept the fleet moving even after poor Nelson fell to an enemy musket ball. “In other words,” writes Nicolson, “love, honor, zeal, and skill won the day.”
A well-reasoned transoceanic rejoinder to Joanne B. Freeman’s Affairs of Honor (2001), and a pleasure for fans of Aubrey and Hornblower.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-075361-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
