Readers looking for a clear picture of “modern history’s best-known evil ruler and murderer” or the course of World War II...
O'Reilly reconstitutes his Killing Patton (2014) for younger audiences with a grabbier title, lightly massaged extracts from the original, and additional period photographs.
It’s a patch job from start to finish. The book opens with a Patton-centric account of the Battle of the Bulge that takes up nearly a third of the volume and closes with 13 arbitrarily ordered minidisquisitions on topics ranging from Hitler’s mustache and his diet to Nazi art looting and the Nuremburg trials; in between, spare glimpses of life in Hitler’s Berlin bunker alternate with accounts of the Allied drive into Germany in 1945. The narrative is composed of rearranged excerpts, subjected to editing that in some cases makes the writing even more overwrought than the original: “The woods are dark and gloomy. A dense fog makes the Germans even less visible,” becomes “The woods are dark and gloomy inside, as if covered in a shroud of pines. A dense fog makes the Germans even more invisible.” Illustrating the text are black-and-white war photos, many generic, some badly placed or bearing uninformative captions (“German tanks”), all too many blurred and murky.
Readers looking for a clear picture of “modern history’s best-known evil ruler and murderer” or the course of World War II in general would be far better off skipping this knockoff for some of the well-chosen titles recommended at the end. (maps, index) (Nonfiction. 11-14)Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62779-396-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2015
Sandwiched between telling lines from the epic of Gilgamesh (“…the warrior’s daughter, the young man’s bride, / he uses her, no one dares to oppose him”) and the exposure of a migrant worker–trafficking ring in Florida in the mid-1990s, this survey methodically presents both a history of the slave trade and what involuntary servitude was and is like in a broad range of times and climes. Though occasionally guilty of overgeneralizing, the authors weave their narrative around contemporary accounts and documented incidents, supplemented by period images or photos and frequent sidebar essays. Also, though their accounts of slavery in North America and the abolition movement in Britain are more detailed than the other chapters, the practice’s past and present in Africa, Asia and the Pacific—including the modern “recruitment” of child soldiers and conditions in the Chinese laogai (forced labor camps)—do come in for broad overviews. For timeliness, international focus and, particularly, accuracy, this leaves Richard Watkins’ Slavery: Bondage Throughout History (2001) in the dust as a first look at a terrible topic. (timeline, index; notes and sources on an associated website) (Nonfiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-88776-914-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Trailing the stampede of Lincoln-bicentennial studies, this profile of “the clan that might have become America’s royal family but instead became America’s cursed family” offers both a wagonload of fascinating period photos and a case study in domestic tragedy and dysfunction. Leading Lincoln scholar Holzer portrays his presidential paterfamilias as an absentee saint—away on business for much of his four sons’ formative years but ever loving and gentle with his notably histrionic wife and an indulgent pushover who let his lads run hog wild. Conversely, though devastated by 3-year-old Eddie’s death in 1850 and 11-year-old Willie’s in 1862, his relations with Robert (the eldest and the only child to live past his teens, presented here as thoroughly unlikable) were distant at best. If the author sometimes hobbles his narrative with fussy details, he also tucks in such intimate touches as samples of homely verse from both parents and children and finishes off with quick looks at all of the direct descendants. A natural companion for Candace Fleming’s fine The Lincolns: A Scrapbook Look at Abraham and Mary (2008). (endnotes, adult-level bibliography) (Biography. 11-14)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59078-303-0
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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