A fresh interpretation of the question of appeasement that will interest students of 20th-century history.
A complex tale of the political rivalry that underlay a key episode in 20th-century world events.
Although the efforts of Neville Chamberlain to preserve the peace in Europe by accommodating Hitler’s demands for territory have long been viewed as an act of moral cowardice, British historian Phillips (The King Who Had To Go: Edward VIII, Mrs. Simpson and the Hidden Politics of the Abdication Crisis, 2017, etc.) notes that it had a certain logic, since going to war with Germany might put the entire British Empire at risk. That empire, he writes, “had been built in the days when France was its only challenger, but now Germany, Japan, and the United States had the resources to put its standing to the severest of tests.” The behind-the-scenes architect of appeasement was Chamberlain’s adviser Horace Wilson; arrayed against them was Winston Churchill, who insisted on a vigorous policy of containment. Chamberlain was willing to go to unusual measures to placate Hitler, including giving in to his demands that African colonies seized by Britain after World War I be returned to Germany—at the risk, the British understood, that the colonized peoples might become ardent Nazis and new enemies. (In any event, notes the author, those peoples were never consulted about whether they wanted to be ruled by a foreign power in the first place.) Chamberlain and Wilson calculated wrongly that the economic costs of rearmament would help keep Hitler in check, and they also took the curious position that Churchill and his allies in government proved a greater danger to the peace than the fascist dictators then in power. In the end, it became clear that Britain would not be able to avoid war, and Churchill accordingly rose to serve as prime minister in Chamberlain’s stead. Churchill, though vain and capable of exercising questionable judgment, was ordinarily a hard fighter who bore no grudges, but Phillips writes that he seems to have taken pleasure in stripping Wilson of his positions and making his life otherwise difficult after Chamberlain’s fall.
A fresh interpretation of the question of appeasement that will interest students of 20th-century history.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-221-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
