A somewhat useful historical reference driven by an idiosyncratic definition of “titan.”
An encyclopedia of “individuals who have each somehow changed the course of world events,” in which murderers and criminals find prominent places.
Award-winning historian and novelist Montefiore (Red Sky at Noon, 2018, etc.)—assisted by Bew (History and Foreign Policy/King’s Coll. London; Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee, 2016, etc.), Frampton (Modern History/Queen Mary, Univ. of London; The Muslim Brotherhood and the West, 2018, etc.), Jones (The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God’s Holy Warriors, 2017, etc.), and Renton (Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power, 2018)—has assembled a wide-ranging compendium of short biographical essays of nearly 200 men (and a few women) who “created the world we live in today.” Admitting that the list is “totally subjective,” Montefiore tends toward the monstrous and murderous. While many entries are predictable, including canonical philosophers and religious figures, political leaders, and too few artists and scientists, some choices may baffle readers. Why Jack the Ripper, for example, but not Thomas Edison? Why Al Capone but not Sigmund Freud? Basil II, a ruler of the Byzantine empire, impresses the author as “the ultimate hero-monster,” a man with an “explosive temper” who earned the epithet “the Bulgar Slayer.” Vlad the Impaler was “a murdering sadist who displayed cruelty so savage that he inspired the legend of Dracula.” Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov “organized and coordinated Stalin’s Great Terror, during which a million innocent victims were shot and millions more exiled to concentration camps.” Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, a Soviet secret policeman, was a “psychopathic rapist and enthusiastic sadist” as well as “a perverted thug.” Even when choosing figures from the arts, Montefiore tends toward the swashbuckling (Byron, Hemingway, Picasso) or tormented (Oscar Wilde, Toulouse-Lautrec). Jane Austen seems out of place in their company. Although the entries are lively and informative, the author does not make the case that all of these individuals deserve recognition among historical giants such as Galileo and Newton, Gandhi and Churchill, or even Elvis Presley.
A somewhat useful historical reference driven by an idiosyncratic definition of “titan.”Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-56446-1
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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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