An enthralling introduction to one of the defining events of the 20th century.
A memoir, written sometime between September 1914 and May 1915, recollects the chaotic beginning of World War I.
In June 1914, T. Tileston Wells, an attorney from New York, set out by sea for Europe with his wife, Georgina; his 18-year-old son; and his 11-year-old daughter. Later that same month, while Wells was in Paris, a Serbian national assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, the spark that ultimately led to the Great War. Initially, Wells was reluctant to leave Paris, but his wife was confident no war would come, so they embarked for Austria by train. However, in July, Austria issued an ultimatum to Serbia, and while the family was vacationing in Cortina, Austria-Hungary officially declared war. The following month, while Wells was touring Riva, Germany and Russia began their conflict, and he was briefly arrested on suspicion of being a Russian spy. He was traveling without a passport—common at the time—but thankfully, he had an introductory letter from William Jennings Bryan, then the U.S. secretary of state. The U.S. Congress appropriated considerable funds to help rescue Americans stuck in Europe at the time, but efforts at rescue were woefully incompetent; meanwhile, banks in Venice, where Wells applied for a passport, weren’t disbursing funds. Wells was eventually able to make to it to Rome in September, right before Benedict XV was selected as the new pope. Soon after, he and his family left Naples on the SS Canopic, which ultimately transported them to Boston. Wells later became a fierce advocate for Serbian relief and the Romanian consul general to America. Kelly (Italy Invades, 2015), Wells’ great-grandson, writes a thoughtful introduction to this remembrance and provides a running editorial commentary that consistently furnishes edifying information about Wells and the war. Wells’ interpretations of the grand history unfolding around him are consistently insightful and prescient and sometimes historically controversial; for example, he contends that Serbia warned Austria of the plan to murder the archduke. It’s fascinating to see a firsthand witness’s account of the war’s start as well as his interpretation of its causes. It’s also thrilling to follow Wells’ attempt to steward his family back to the relative safety of the United States. This is historical scholarship at its best: rigorous, testimonial, and dramatic.
An enthralling introduction to one of the defining events of the 20th century.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 154
Publisher: History Invasions Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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