Well-balanced, though not likely to sway either detractors or admirers one way or another. We look forward to the planned...
The authorized, remarkably evenhanded biography of the grimly divisive, late Iron Lady of Britain.
Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013), by Fleet Street journalist and debut author Moore’s account, was not one for the examined life. Like her friend Ronald Reagan, she acted and then moved on, stopping only for an occasional moment of self-criticism for, say, not having been better prepared for a Parliamentary question-and-answer session. And act she did, introducing schemes of privatization and austerity, busting unions, giving aid and comfort to white apartheid regimes in southern Africa—though, Moore hastens to note, her written reference to a “nigger brown” frock was just a garden-variety expression of the time. One feels for the author, given his subject’s lack of self-reflection and paucity of written records, for Thatcher was no writer save for heavily underlined, exclamatory do-this and do-that directives on pieces of paper handed to her. Nonetheless, Moore acquits himself well in this respectful but certainly not hagiographic account. If it’s not entirely warts-and-all, it reckons with some of the darker aspects of her time in power, including her habit of conducting periodic purges to weed out the ideologically suspect within her ranks, as well as some poor and even possibly criminal decisions, such as the sinking of the Argentine ship Belgrano in the early days of the Falklands War. That Thatcher enjoyed far from universal popular support was clear in the aftermath of her recent death, but Moore is correct to note that the relentlessly self-made, all-controlling leader enjoyed a great boost thanks to the Falklands War, which “established [her] personal mastery of the political scene, and convinced people of her special gifts of leadership.”
Well-balanced, though not likely to sway either detractors or admirers one way or another. We look forward to the planned sequel, covering the years of Thatcher’s political decline.Pub Date: May 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-95894-5
Page Count: 912
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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