Beevor (D-Day, 2009, etc.) joins the ranks of other contemporary British historians to tackle the entire war in one volume—e.g., Andrew Roberts (The Storm of War) and Gordon Corrigan (The Second World War).
All three books move chronologically, with Roberts grouping by driving themes (“Onslaught, Climacteric, Retribution”), Corrigan by military theaters (the Russian, the Asian and so on) and Beevor by more numerous, geographically detailed conflicts. The result here can be stultifying in its richness of detail, but Beevor makes blazingly vivid the sense of mass upheaval and grief prevalent in all parts of the world. The author’s coverage of the East Asian conflicts is masterful, and he emphasizes early on the key skirmish in August 1939 between Soviet commander Georgi Zhukov’s forces and the Japanese at Nomonhan in Outer Mongolia, in which the Soviets repulsed the Japanese in an appalling massacre. Stalin received Zhukov as a hero, while the Japanese made the portentous non-aggression pact with Stalin just before Operation Barbarossa and moved instead against France, the Netherlands, Britain and the U.S. Navy. Beevor’s knowledge of Crete, occupied Paris, Stalingrad and Berlin infuses these segments with particular nuance, though some readers may wish he had devoted more space to each. Throughout, the author remains cognizant of the brutalization of civilians, including the systematic rape of women. In his chapter on the Nazi extermination camps, he focuses on the account of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, to demonstrate how ordinary the day-to-day horror had become. Eisenhower’s decision not to take Berlin—too many casualties—was “the correct decision even if for the wrong reason,” Beevor writes, because Stalin would never have allowed it. While the author hurriedly wraps up the endgame, the majority of the narrative is a deeply enlightening experience.
A work of vast research, depth and insight—perhaps too vast for some readers.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-02374-0
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | MILITARY | HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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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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