A necessary book for those who study dictators.
Goeschel (Modern European History/Univ. of Manchester; Suicide in Nazi Germany, 2009) examines the strained relationship—never a true friendship—between the two dictators.
Both Hitler and Mussolini served as corporals in World War I, and both seized power through brutal violence and apparently legal political activity. Their “new order” was based on replacing the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles. Both were anti-Bolshevik and anti-Jewish. While anti-Semitism was central to Hitler’s ideology, Mussolini believed in a strategy of racial exclusion, not extermination. Mussolini was a strategic model for the rise of Nazism as the driving force behind the attempt to reshape postwar politics and diplomacy. In Italy, the monarchy and papacy were maintained, curtailing a complete dictatorship, a fact that Hitler often criticized. Curiously, Hitler was the instigator of the alliance, which wasn’t signed until well after World War II began. As the author demonstrates, the relationship was never ideological; it was politically constructed and contained little substance. Tensions were constant, not only between the dictators, but also their nations; few Germans could forget that Italy deserted their alliance and fought against them. The rivalry manifested itself at all of the meetings, which were really about image. Hitler quickly dropped his hero worship of Mussolini and, as an all-powerful dictator, monopolized their short conversations and made the decisions. Mussolini doggedly pursued his goal to become the “determining weight” in the Mediterranean and continued to foster Italy’s détente with England, hedging his bets with brinkmanship and opportunism. Hitler’s method of diplomacy was to completely skip the bureaucratic machinations, make backdoor deals, and put every nation’s fate in his own hands. The author methodically follows the meetings through the years, from great shows of power and exorbitant expenditures to the secretive meetings at Wolf’s Lair late in the war, which were no more than summons to Mussolini to receive Hitler’s instructions. Ultimately, Goeschel skillfully exposes the relationship as that of two men who merely tolerated each other to amass power.
A necessary book for those who study dictators.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-300-17883-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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