by Antony Beevor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 20, 2022
A definitive account.
The acclaimed British historian tackles the Russian civil war.
Despite current events, Russia is not the colossus that frightened other great powers during much of the 20th century. Although its revolution is no longer a scholarly obsession, Beevor, the winner of the Samuel Johnson and Wolfson prizes, among others, masterfully recounts the violent events that seemed to change everything. When Russia declared war on Germany in 1914, it fielded the identical titanic but shambling army defeated by Japan in 1905, overseen by the same autocratic but dimwitted Czar Nicholas II and a dysfunctional civil government. Sustained by grit and Allied aid, it held together for nearly three years despite catastrophic losses. However, by March 1917, increasing desertion, indiscipline, and violence against officers combined with widespread civilian suffering persuaded the still clueless czar to abdicate. Beevor’s account of what followed is both authoritative and disheartening. No one could correct Russia’s crumbling infrastructure. Hungry city dwellers blamed the new leaders, and crime and violence flourished. Their worst decision was to continue the war, which increased insubordination at the front and perhaps even more so behind the lines. Lenin arrived in April to command the small Bolshevik Party, which grew and ultimately seized power that October. Historians have long stopped portraying him as the good guy in contrast to Stalin and agree that he succeeded as all tyrants succeed: murderous ruthlessness, crushing rivals, and incessantly repeating promises that appealed to his supporters (“all power to the Soviets,” “peace to the peasants”) and then not keeping them. This is a vivid description of a revolution that featured as much mass murder as military action. Readers know the outcome, but the Red triumph was not universal. A few Baltic states won independence, and in the final and perhaps largest campaign, Polish forces routed the Red Army. Always a meticulous researcher, Beevor has done his homework in an era when everyone recorded their thoughts (even the czar kept a diary), delivering a detailed yet unedifying story through the eyes of many participants.
A definitive account.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-49387-8
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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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 Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales
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by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez
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by Howard Zinn
by Ron Chernow ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 13, 2025
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
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New York Times Bestseller
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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