Brilliantly written account of the 18th-century nobleman was a key player in British naval strategy during the War of Independence—and who invented our favorite fast food. The fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-92) is usually written off as the archetypal wicked aristocrat: a self-seeker who neglected his country's interest in the pursuit of the pleasures of the bedroom and the gaming table. Here, British naval historian Rodger- -drawing on a wide range of sources, including Sandwich's own letters and papers—attempts to go beyond this caricature by viewing his subject in the context of the realities of 18th-century party politics and naval warfare. His Sandwich emerges as an ambitious man with many interests and talents but little wealth—a man who consequently was distrusted by his own class and failed to achieve full scope for his powers. His beloved wife went insane, and the mistress he subsequently took was murdered. As First Sea Lord, Sandwich began a fundamental reform of the fleet, making use of seasoned timber and the latest technique of sheathing ships' bottoms with copper to improved speed—but the American Revolution interrupted these plans. Rodger argues that Sandwich's strategy in that war made sense in terms of contemporary presuppositions and the limitations of a Britain under attack from France and Spain: The 13 colonies were lost but Quebec and the West Indies were retained and, above all, the homeland was saved from invasion. Today, Sandwich is best remembered for his part in the revival and continued popularity of Handel's music—and for sandwiches. A pleasure to read—and offering new depth and insights into the political and social values of a critical epoch. (Illustrations)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03587-5
Page Count: 425
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
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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