The Hungarians : A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat

Rating:
Summary: A comprehensive focus on the Hungarian people
Review: Hungarian history is largely omitted from college-level courses, at least as a focus on its own: European journalist and television commentator Paul Lendvai corrects this omission with The Hungarians: A Thousand Years Of Victory In Defeat, a comprehensive focus on the Hungarian people once known in Europe as 'huns'. Hungarians became defenders of the Christian West and fought many freedom battles: The Hungarians traces their many achievements, their country's changing history, and how the Hungarians have survived as a people against all odds.


Rating:
Summary: For the Magyar but not of the Magyar
Review: Stlyistically this book is palatable to the novice historian who's looking for something beyond "the facts". The author successfully entertains the reader with a melodic progression through the history of a former transient,esoteric, people from outside the bosom of europe. Using the natural tendency of everyone to root for the underdog the reader is lead with elequent prose to read through the successive chapters hoping for the proud and stalwart Magyar to be vindicated with victory only to be denied--but, its history.
"Victory in Defeat" is used often by the author revealing how the history of the Magyar was defined not so much by themselves but by their neighbors. From the defeat of these horseback raiders by the Germans more than a thousand years ago forceing them to leave their hunter gatherer past and accept a agrarian existence, to the crushing defeat under the unstopable juggernaut of Stalins USSR, these people have been forged into a community of realists with the spectre of "what could of been" standing on their souls. Subjugated by no less then the Germans and Turks, and defeated by the Russians at two crucial points in time its ironic that the author reveals that the darkest days of Hungary were not under the heel of a foreigner but from a Hungarian of Jewish decent in the communist post WWII days. Its odd that the author seems critical of the few times in its history Hungary persued a self propagating ideal, especially in the Magyarization period during the later half of the nineteenth century and the nationalistic "Horthy" years.
I think this book falls short in two places. First, it follows a contemporary line of seeing history through the eyes of the most famous and or privlidged personalities of the times they lived which can be a deceptivly narrow perspective, though it can make a more dynamic read. It was refreshing when the author did elucidate the commoners lot during significant periods in Hungary's history, but not enough for my liking. Of course the farther back in histroy the author reaches the harder it is to gauge the average mans life due to lack of info but it should really be the foundation of any historical accounting. Secondly I came away unsatisfied that the Hungarian history is properly expressed due to the fact that a Magyar perspective is relayed from non Magyars of either German or Jewish decent. At the end of the book the author lists a number of persons who left Hungary and made significant contributions to the many sciences but often revealed their non Magyar decent. Thus I can only come to the conclusion that only a true Magyar could relate what is and what is not Magyar and who is and who is not a succesfull Magyar. This book is definatly worth the price and worth owning. But I'd suggest reading as many Hungarian historical books as thier are availabe to gain a rounded view of this elusive people's culture history.

Rating:
Summary: For the Magyar but not of the Magyar
Review: Stlyistically this book is palatable to the novice historian who's looking for something beyond "the facts". The author successfully entertains the reader with a melodic progression through the history of a former transient,esoteric, people from outside the bosom of europe. Using the natural tendency of everyone to root for the underdog the reader is lead with elequent prose to read through the successive chapters hoping for the proud and stalwart Magyar to be vindicated with victory only to be denied--but, its history.
"Victory in Defeat" is used often by the author revealing how the history of the Magyar was defined not so much by themselves but by their neighbors. From the defeat of these horseback raiders by the Germans more than a thousand years ago forceing them to leave their hunter gatherer past and accept a agrarian existence, to the crushing defeat under the unstopable juggernaut of Stalins USSR, these people have been forged into a community of realists with the spectre of "what could of been" standing on their souls. Subjugated by no less then the Germans and Turks, and defeated by the Russians at two crucial points in time its ironic that the author reveals that the darkest days of Hungary were not under the heel of a foreigner but from a Hungarian of Jewish decent in the communist post WWII days. Its odd that the author seems critical of the few times in its history Hungary persued a self propagating ideal, especially in the Magyarization period during the later half of the nineteenth century and the nationalistic "Horthy" years.
I think this book falls short in two places. First, it follows a contemporary line of seeing history through the eyes of the most famous and or privlidged personalities of the times they lived which can be a deceptivly narrow perspective, though it can make a more dynamic read. It was refreshing when the author did elucidate the commoners lot during significant periods in Hungary's history, but not enough for my liking. Of course the farther back in histroy the author reaches the harder it is to gauge the average mans life due to lack of info but it should really be the foundation of any historical accounting. Secondly I came away unsatisfied that the Hungarian history is properly expressed due to the fact that a Magyar perspective is relayed from non Magyars of either German or Jewish decent. At the end of the book the author lists a number of persons who left Hungary and made significant contributions to the many sciences but often revealed their non Magyar decent. Thus I can only come to the conclusion that only a true Magyar could relate what is and what is not Magyar and who is and who is not a succesfull Magyar. This book is definatly worth the price and worth owning. But I'd suggest reading as many Hungarian historical books as thier are availabe to gain a rounded view of this elusive people's culture history.

Rating:
Summary: Readable, Reliable History of a Little-Known Country
Review: This is an outstanding, very easy to read, history of a little known and understood country and people, the Hungarians, who are NOT slavs nor to be confused with the Huns. I heard the author give a talk at a dinner in Washington, DC, which prompted to read his book. I have not been disappointed. On the contrary, this is the most readable, entertaining history that I've read in years. Lendvai makes David McCullough look like an amateur, in terms of the scope of the years covered and the masterful way in which he writes, displaying a command of significant details and telling anecdotes. Even those with no particular interest in Hungary or eastern Europe would enjoy this book for its style of writing alone. This should be must reading for anyone planning a trip to Hungary.

Rating:
Summary: Readable, Reliable History of a Little-Known Country
Review: This is an outstanding, very easy to read, history of a little known and understood country and people, the Hungarians, who are NOT slavs nor to be confused with the Huns. I heard the author give a talk at a dinner in Washington, DC, which prompted to read his book. I have not been disappointed. On the contrary, this is the most readable, entertaining history that I've read in years. Lendvai makes David McCullough look like an amateur, in terms of the scope of the years covered and the masterful way in which he writes, displaying a command of significant details and telling anecdotes. Even those with no particular interest in Hungary or eastern Europe would enjoy this book for its style of writing alone. This should be must reading for anyone planning a trip to Hungary.

Rating:
Summary: Engaging history on this people
Review: Well written, detailed, and fascinating history of this often beleaguered but important people and country. My interest is mostly in Ural-Altaic linguistics, which includes Hungarian, which belongs to what is called the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic sub-family, which contains Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian, but I also found I enjoyed picking up some history about the Hungarians and their culture, too. I already had the basics and knew about when they'd first arrived in eastern Europe, and about their later wars with the Tatars, Turks, and Russians, but I learned quite bit more about it from this book.

A little aside here, Hungarians have contributed disproportionately, relative to their numbers, to modern math, physics, and other areas of science. They include greats like mathematician Paul Erdos, who founded the area of discrete mathematics, worked in many areas of pure math, and may have been the most prolific mathmematician who ever lived, with 1500 papers; John von Neumann, who developed game theory and was the inventor of the electronic computer; Edward Teller, the "father of the H-Bomb," and Bela Julesz, a mathematical psychophysicist and researcher in the field of visual perception, and recipient of the prestigious MacArthur "Genius Award." And last but not least, Andy Grove, the former President and CEO for 20 years of Intel Corporation, the famous computer chip-maker, was Hungarian also.

Interestingly, although I'm not Hungarian myself, I have a few connections to some of the above. I'm related to Ernest Lawrence, who invented the cyclotron, or atom smasher, which made possible critical technology for the building of the atom bomb, without which there wouldn't have been the later hydrogen bomb. Lawrence won the Nobel Prize in 1939 for his invention. I worked at Intel for several years, and met Andy Grove. And my immediate boss at Intel was Hungarian too, and he and I used to discuss Hungarian history and culture occasionally, which he used to get a kick out of, since I was the only non-Hungarian he knew with any interest in it.

I also had the pleasure of travelling around Hungary and most of the eastern-bloc countries back in the early 80s, before the wall came down, and found the Hungarian people both worldly and hospitable. It's said that because of their turbulent history, Hungarians approach life realistically and without illusions, and I think I can say this is certainly true based on my own experience.

But getting back to the present book, I wanted to mention one other interesting fact about the Hungarians, which is that they are most closely related to the Ostyak tribes of Siberia. The Ostyaks have the distinction of being the only tribes and villages the Communists couldn't take over and subjugate, and their villages remained politically independent of Moscow throughout the entire communist period.