A splendid introduction to a pivotal figure in the history of English literature. (21 b&w illustrations)
The first in a new series, Ackroyd Brief Lives, offers a fascinating portrait of the man who has been called the father of English poetry.
Ackroyd (The Origins of the English Imagination, 2003, etc.) vividly depicts 14th-century London and the busy life of Geoffrey Chaucer. The poet, Ackroyd makes clear, was not an ivory-tower figure but a man of the world: a courtier entrusted by successive kings with diplomatic missions abroad and a civil servant who supervised royal building projects and oversaw the collection of taxes on wool and leather in the Port of London. Though brief, the biography is filled with details bringing Chaucer’s world and work to life. We see the younger man being educated in the royal court, rising in the diplomatic service, absorbing the culture of France and Italy, and acquiring a reputation as a courtly poet. Records are scanty, but Ackroyd cites evidence of his various financial dealings and legal entanglements, including an indictment for rape as well as lawsuit over debt. Given the many gaps in the records, speculations are inevitable, and when discussing specific events, Ackroyd relies on hedges like “might have,” “could have,” “it has been argued that,” and “we can possibly imagine.” The core of the book, however, concerns Chaucer’s work as a poet, and here Ackroyd is on firmer ground. He quotes frequently from the poems—The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, and, of course, The Canterbury Tales—explaining allusions, discussing style, illustrating the influences of French and Italian poets, especially Boccaccio, and pointing out Chaucer’s skill at manipulating the English language. You get a clear sense of English as an evolving language, and, for those puzzled by Chaucer’s version of it, Ackroyd includes an appendix with modern translations of all the quoted material.
A splendid introduction to a pivotal figure in the history of English literature. (21 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-50797-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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
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