Knowledgeable, well-written history that lacks thematic clarity.
The former Cambridge history professor returns with a survey of the political and economic ramifications of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles.
The narrative's most prominent figures are David Lloyd George (1863-1945), prime minister for much of the war, and John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), then a young economist advising the British treasury on financing the war and later a prominent critic of the treaty that ended it. Tracing their wartime careers, Clarke (Mr. Churchill's Profession: The Statesman as Author and the Book that Defined the "Special Relationship,” 2012, etc.) sets out "to capture an understanding of events and causation as viewed at the time through the spectacles of Anglo-American liberalism." This, he contends, involves a "common heritage of moralism" and "a further important theme—the concept of guilt." The author suggests that "the moralisation of the origins of the war…led to the moralisation of the peace terms" and thus also to the reparations demanded of a defeated Germany, along with acceptance of the notorious "war guilt" clause in the Versailles treaty. However, he argues, the origins of the war might have been found with equal validity and less ensuing bitterness in the inevitable imbalance in European affairs caused by the unification of Germany under Otto von Bismarck and that nation's growing economic and military power. Taken as a whole, the book is pleasantly readable, though casual readers will find the sections on international macroeconomics tough going. The various historical incidents reported are well-researched and presented with clarity and wry humor. However, while Clarke seems confident that he is advancing an intriguing thesis, that thesis proves frustratingly elusive. Themes of economic power, political posturing, and the liberals' tendency to view international affairs through a moral lens recur, but they never coalesce into a coherent argument to reward the reader's effort.
Knowledgeable, well-written history that lacks thematic clarity.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62040-660-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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