An able contribution to the history of the modern Middle East.
A study of the brief 1973 war that yielded a pyrrhic victory, of sorts, for both Israel and its Arab foes.
Israeli journalist Rabinovich, who covered the war for the Jerusalem Post, suggests that the combined attack of Egypt and Syria (and, later, Jordan and Iraq) on Israel was the result of failed diplomacy on the part of both sides: Israel would not budge from the territories it had conquered in the 1967 Six-Day War, and a shamed Egypt would not entertain the thought that Israel might have a point in wanting buffer zones between its national borders and Anwar Sadat’s Soviet-equipped armies. Although signs of the impending attack were abundant, and although an enigmatic Egyptian spy had revealed plans for the assault to Israeli intelligence agents, the war still caught Israel by surprise; heads would roll in the aftermath, even if Israeli intelligence chief Eli Zeira, “whose misreading of enemy intentions was the most palpable failure of the war, had a highly rewarding career after his forced retirement from the army as an intelligence consultant to foreign governments.” Rabinovich does a fine job of describing the war as it unfolded on the ground, moving from firefight to firefight and crediting both Israeli and Arab soldiers for great acts of bravery under fire; if his account is rather less dramatic than Howard Blum’s Eve of Destruction (p. 1053), which covers much the same ground, it will be particularly useful for those interested in battlefield strategy and tactics. Though Israel eventually broke the combined offensive and even had a chance at staging a counterinvasion, writes Rabinovich, the victory was extraordinarily costly: as he notes, the war, which lasted just short of three weeks, cost Israel three times as many soldiers per capita as the US lost in ten years in Vietnam.
An able contribution to the history of the modern Middle East.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-8052-4176-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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