The first full-length study of the Irish Samuel Adams—a master propagandist and organizational dervish who transformed the cause of his native land's freedom from poets' pipe dream to political reality. Jailed in 1866 for participating in the Fenian revolutionary brotherhood, Devoy (18421928) was released in 1871 and exiled for the remaining years of his sentence. Disembarking in New York, he used America as an effective beachhead from which to assault British misrule. For the next 50 years, Devoy influenced nearly every major aspect of Anglo-Irish and Irish-American relations through his work as an editor for the New York Herald, publisher of the Gaelic American, and leader of Clan na Gael, an Irish-American group that supplied the rebels with money and ammunition. In the late 1870s, he allied with Michael Davitt in championing land reform and with Charles Stewart Parnell in pushing for home rule. Golway, a New York Observer staffer and coauthor of The Irish in America (not reviewed), is as adept at detailing Devoy's daring as he is at explaining the background of Irish politics and Devoy's turf battles (Devoy could direct sharp, occasionally unfair invective at rebels like Eamon de Valera if he detected backsliding or harebrained schemes). Remarkably, 50 years after he first clipped the British lion's tail, he secretly contacted Germany during WW I, defying American neutrality, in an effort to secure arms for another uprising— thus setting in motion the events that lead to the Easter Rebellion, the catalyst for Ireland's successful revolt against John Bull. In summing up Devoy's last difficult years—the loss of hearing and sight, a bittersweet reunion with the fiancÇe he never married, and grudging acceptance of an Irish Free State that did not yet achieve full independence—Golway poignantly evokes the cost of the rebel's single-minded commitment as ``Irish America's conscience, defense, and . . . chief organizer.'' A riveting biography of one of the key figures in forging the American connection to Irish republicanism.
Pub Date: March 17, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18118-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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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