Despite few revelations and though dominated by the immense war between two unsympathetic evil empires, this is a lively,...
A new history of a “decisive year” in World War II.
Because Nazi Germany lacked the means to win a prolonged war, each year of the war could qualify as significant, but few readers will object to this expert history of 1941, a year when Hitler made a flurry of stupid decisions. Award-winning former Newsweek journalist Nagorski (The Nazi Hunters, 2017, etc.) emphasizes that when Hitler’s advisers warned that his targets—France, Britain, and the Soviet Union—could mobilize much greater resources, he concluded, paradoxically, that Germany must go to war immediately while its military held the advantage. Conquering Poland in 1939 was relatively easy, but the 1940 defeat of France (considered the world’s strongest military power) flabbergasted everyone and did nothing to discourage Hitler’s megalomania. At the beginning of 1941, Germany had become massively powerful, and by spring, Winston Churchill’s campaign to involve the United States was slowly advancing. President Franklin Roosevelt had revived the draft the previous fall. The Lend-Lease Act passed Congress in March, and the Destroyers-for-Bases agreement was finalized in September. Most readers will be surprised when Nagorski points out that Hitler’s plan to invade the Soviet Union was no secret thanks to talkative Nazi officials and Soviet spies. Allied diplomats sent repeated warnings, but Stalin, as deluded as Hitler, dismissed them as capitalist disinformation. When the invasion began in June, everyone knew that the war had entered its critical phase, but it was winter before Allied leaders stopped worrying that the Soviet Union would collapse. Popular histories extol Allied lend-lease aid, but little arrived during 1941, so the Red Army pulled itself together on its own. The author ends with Hitler’s bizarre declaration of war on America after Japan’s December attack on Pearl Harbor. For much of the last half of the book, Nagorski concentrates on the Russian front, where over 90 percent of the fighting occurred, a figure that diminished only modestly in later years.
Despite few revelations and though dominated by the immense war between two unsympathetic evil empires, this is a lively, opinionated account of a critical year.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8111-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
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.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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