A man with Lincoln’s beliefs could never win a presidential election today, but as portrayed in these pages he could very...
Honest Abe was a white supremacist, a trade protectionist, a pro-industrialist—in short, a Henry Clay Whig whose greatest contribution to history was his insistence that the experiment in American freedom had relevance for the rest of the planet.
Neo-con Lind (Vietnam: The Necessary War, 1999, etc.), a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, administers a much overdue beating to the vast carpet of Lincoln studies. As he illustrates throughout this corrective work, the complex Lincoln of history has gradually been simplified into a 1960s liberal; the Boy Who Read by Candlelight, the Young Man Who Split Rails, the Great Emancipator, the Benevolent Big Brother in the Fraternity of Man. But the author demonstrates that Lincoln believed blacks were inferior to whites and that the races shouldn’t mix. He thought long and planned hard for the transportation of American blacks to colonies in Africa or Central America (or even Texas); he freed slaves only in the states that had seceded, and only after those states refused to rejoin the Union. Credit for emancipation, Lind writes, properly ought to go to the intransigent Southern leaders who forced Lincoln’s hand. The author reminds us that Lincoln wished mainly to preserve the Union and to adhere to the Founding Fathers’ principles (including deism: the 16th president had little use for traditional Christianity). Lind is most interesting and convincing in his long discussion of Lincoln’s place in the history of American’s emerging racial attitudes. Other sections are primarily cut-and-paste rehashes, not particularly well buttressed by numerous endnotes of the “as quoted in” variety. The text also slows down when the author discusses trade, tariffs, immigration and Reconstruction. And some readers may raise eyebrows at his implication that the current President Bush is a scion of Lincoln, at least as far as the extension of freedom is concerned.
A man with Lincoln’s beliefs could never win a presidential election today, but as portrayed in these pages he could very well get shot.Pub Date: May 17, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-50739-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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