Exhaustive biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914–2003), one of England’s foremost and controversial 20th-century historians, critics and essayists.
NBCC Award winner Sisman (The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge, 2006, etc.) draws from archival correspondence and meticulous research, displaying a talent for balancing his subject’s flaws and strengths. By his own admission, Trevor-Roper was inclined toward “pride” as well as “imprudence, ostentation, volubility, and the need for company,” all of which manifested in various situations. Sisman successfully avoids turning the book into an account of a prickly, scholarly egoist who succumbed to hubris, a popular misconception. Trevor-Roper—who gained acclaim for investigating Hitler’s death and who was later panned for mistakenly stating that the Hitler diaries found in the early ’80s were authentic—emerges as a multilayered figure whose life should not be framed solely by these two widely publicized events. Though readers familiar with World War II intrigue and British radio intelligence will especially appreciate the chapters spanning the period, Sisman suggests that Trevor-Roper should also be remembered for his literary contributions and for the dignity he maintained despite heavy criticism. Leisurely in its pacing and studded with anecdotes that include major figures such as Winston Churchill, Henry Kissinger, Malcolm Muggeridge and Katharine Hepburn, the book considers how one man touched some of the most exclusive social circles while standing apart from them, and how he shaped public discourse with a formidable pen. Empathetic, illuminating and occasionally witty, if challenging in its depth and range of detail.
Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6976-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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