Anka Muhlstein, known for her biographies of Queen Victoria and James Rothschild (not reviewed), here traces the life of Robert Cavalier de La Salle, early French explorer of the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and Texas and founder of Louisiana. She paints a pretty gripping picture of 17th-century Canada, with its tension between brawling, murderous Montreal, populated by coureurs de bois (backwoodsmen) and drunken Indians, and sober Quebec, with its farmers and administrators. We see the forests teeming with horseflies and edible ants, Iroquois war bands slaughtering Illinois villages—landscapes (to the French) terrifying, strange, and irresistible. Made owner of the land around a primitive fort called Frontenac on Lake Ontario in 1675, La Salle enriched himself via the beaver trade and mounted grueling voyages across the frozen wastes with a lifelong Indian guide, Nika. La Salle was unique among early European explorers by virtue of his intimacy with the native people, whose language he spoke. Muhlstein tries to convey something of the absurdity and unease that characterized most contacts between Europeans and Indians but is always constrained by the anecdotal nature of her enterprise. She manages simply to show La Salle's own shrewd humanity. But visionary as he was and probably, at times, half-insane, his fantastical courage and endurance could not cope with the complexity of large-scale official operations, and when he was finally commissioned by Louis XIV in 1687 to found a settlement in the territory that was not yet called Louisiana, the expedition ended in devastation and mutiny. Muhlstein's book is simply and graphically written, geared to the general reader who wants to feel the raw barbarity of frontier life rather than wade through the socioeconomic intricacies of colonial history. This makes the narrative accessible and vivid, though a surprising absence of maps makes the geographical meanderings somewhat hard to follow. Perhaps it is erroneously assumed that contemporary readers know their country as well as La Salle did.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55970-219-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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