As Stott reveals in this engrossing history, lust, greed and the unquenchable thirst for fame were forces of evil that...
A literary history reveals the sorrows of the Romantics.
Central to Romanticism was the cult of personality, the “ideology of the creative genius and its attendant fascination with the lives of individuals.” Among the most fascinating was Lord George Gordon Byron, who, by 1816, was the most famous poet in England, as much for the gossip he incited as for his sensuous poetry. As Stott (English/Univ. of Buffalo, SUNY; The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, 2009) argues in this impressive group biography, Byron assiduously created himself as a celebrity by “generating rumors about his atheism and sexual appetites, and by appearing dressed as a monk or in flamboyant Albanian robes, hosting orgiastic parties in which wine was drunk from a carved skull.” Women swooned over him, no one more persistently than Claire Clairmont, stepsister of Mary Shelley, who began her pursuit when she was 16. Claire, Mary and her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Byron’s sometime friend and personal physician John Polidori make up the tragic cast of characters entangled with, and wounded by, the self-serving Byron. Despite this book’s sensational title, Stott focuses not on the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein nor The Vampyre, a tale by Polidori that Byron stole and published under his own name; the literary monsters who emerge from this story of selfishness and manipulation are Byron and Shelley. Although Byron deigned to sleep with Clairmont, he rejected her when she became pregnant, then insisted on sole custody of their daughter, refusing to allow Claire to see her. Shelley’s abandoned wife, Harriet, killed herself at 21; Mary’s half sister Fanny killed herself, as well, “unsettled” by Mary and Percy’s elopement. Polidori, a victim of Byron’s scorn and his own failed aspirations, committed suicide at the age of 25.
As Stott reveals in this engrossing history, lust, greed and the unquenchable thirst for fame were forces of evil that imbued the age of Romanticism with grief.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60598-614-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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
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