by Ann Tusa ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1997
The subtitle here is somewhat misleading: This is not so much about Berlin as about the petty and insignificant wrangles and crises involving the four Allied occupying powers (the US, the USSR, France, and Great Britain) of the city that became ``the pivot of the Cold War,'' focusing on the period between the end of WW II and the building of the infamous wall that cleaved Berlin in August 1961. Tusa, a British historian who specializes in postwar Germany, is an exhaustive researcher but an often stolid narrator, given to minutiae. She does, however, do an excellent job in profiling the Russian, British, French, and American leaders drawn into the battle over Berlin in the 1950s and 1960s. For the most part, though, her work plods along, detailing diplomatic impasse after impasse, particularly after Khrushchev threatened in November 1958 to block the Western powers' air, rail, and highway access to Berlin. Fortunately, Tusa's work comes to life in the long section describing events before, during, and immediately after the wall's construction, and in her brief summary of events leading up to the wall's destruction in 1989. She reveals that the three Western powers were woefully unprepared for the crisis—they were focused on the city's accessibility rather than its possible physical division—and responded to it very uncertainly. President Kennedy ultimately sent Vice President Johnson and Lucius Clay to the city; his own celebrated visit came only two years later). Yet even a wall ultimately could not stanch the desire of the East Germany's citizens to escape their socioeconomic and political nightmare, particularly after the hopes raised by perestroika in the mid- 1980s. This solid but overly long work will be of interest mainly to aficionados of the Cold War and of postwar diplomatic history. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-201-14399-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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