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RING OF STEEL

Name: RING OF STEEL
Author: Alexander Watson
ISBN: 978-0465018727

GERMANY AND AUSTRIA-HUNGARY IN WORLD WAR I

by Alexander Watson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2014

For World War I and modern European history enthusiasts, this is a comprehensive work that ably conveys the disintegration...

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A British historian examines the desperate ethnic divisions roiling the Austro-Hungarian Empire that both propelled it to war in 1914 and undermined its success.

From the first decision to go to war after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to the peace signed in Versailles in June 1919, Watson (History/Univ. of London; Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918, 2008) sifts carefully through the thinking and actions of the main Central Powers, the Habsburgs and the Germans, in provoking a European conflagration against enemies of superior numbers and military might (the Russians, British and French). Punishing Serbia for the assassinations meant bringing in its powerful ally Russia, but Watson argues that the sprawling multiethnic Austria-Hungary had largely lost control of its nationalist pockets and feared a “domino effect” if this insurgency was not violently crushed. Indeed, the empire’s dangerously paranoid statesmen promoted war out of “a profound sense of weakness, fear and even despair.” Germany was also operating from a place of deep insecurity regarding France, Russia and Britain, and Watson shows how Chief of the German General Staff Helmuth von Moltke was rather more “defensive and reactive” than saber-rattling. Thus the Central Powers were able to sell the war to the people as a defensive action, surrounded as they were by hostile enemies—“a ring of steel.” The “pervasive sense of threat” to the community translated initially into a patriotic spur to mobilization, but it morphed into suspicion and vigilantism as refugees from the eastern war zones of Galicia flooded into the interior and provoked ethnic hostilities and anti-Semitism. The German atrocities in Belgium and Russians’ in Galicia, the Ottomans’ treatment of the Armenians and the ultimate claim that “security” was the German Reich’s ultimate goal—all of this paved the way for Nazi genocide.

For World War I and modern European history enthusiasts, this is a comprehensive work that ably conveys the disintegration of empire.

Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014

ISBN: 978-0465018727

Page Count: 800

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014

Categories:

HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY

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TOMBSTONE

THE EARP BROTHERS, DOC HOLLIDAY, AND THE VENDETTA RIDE FROM HELL

by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.

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Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.

The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.

Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.

Pub Date: April 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4

Page Count: 400

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST OUTLAWS
by Tom Clavin

- BOOK REVIEW
FOLLOW ME TO HELL
by Tom Clavin

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST HILL
by Bob Drury & Tom Clavin

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WHY WE SWIM

by Bonnie Tsui ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020

An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.

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A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.

For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).

An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.