A lucid companion to The Victorians (2003), and a fine work of social history of a world gone by.
Empires come and go, though seldom as suddenly and thoroughly as Great Britain’s fall from world dominance.
Many Britons celebrated Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 as a sign that all the rationing and shortages and general gloominess of the immediate postwar era were over. Wilson (London, 2003, etc.) will have none of it: The coronation, he writes, was “a consoling piece of theatre, designed to disguise from themselves the fact that the British had . . . lost an empire and failed to find a role.” If the collapse of empire seemed swift, it was a long time in coming; Wilson locates the decline in the trenches of WWI, in growing independence movements throughout the colonies, but especially in the backroom diplomatic angling of WWII, when putative allies seem simply to have outfoxed the clever British prime minister. “All Churchill’s cherished war plans—to guard and fight for the Eastern Mediterranean, to protect the British Empire by land in the Far East, to liberate Poland, and above all to establish a strong and united postwar Europe—were swept aside at Tehran by Roosevelt and Stalin,” Wilson writes. The world surely would have been different had it been otherwise, for, as Wilson argues early on, Britain, though conservative and monarchical, championed the ideals of personal liberty while supposedly revolutionary Russia and Germany destroyed them; though a few tried to assume the roles, Britain spawned no Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin of its own to struggle to keep its empire, and democracy endured. Throughout, Wilson writes appreciatively, and without false sentimentality, of the old England of bicycles and weekend picnics and Agatha Christie.
A lucid companion to The Victorians (2003), and a fine work of social history of a world gone by.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-10198-1
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
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
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