This comprehensive book details the impact of the ancient, southern European country of Italy.
This is the third volume in a series that started with 2014’s All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded, about Laycock’s homeland of Great Britain, and was followed by Kelly and Laycock’s America Invades (2015). Now the duo tackles a country to which both feel connected, one whose history goes back millennia to ancient Rome. As Kelly explains in his introduction: “Italians are literally and figuratively an ‘outgoing’ people….From Marco Polo to Christopher Columbus, they have been some of the world’s greatest travelers, explorers, and adventurers.” As a result, there are few countries which Italy has not, at least theoretically, touched. For example, it even has a tenuous connection to the distant Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, where its military has taken part in joint exercises in recent years. Italy has an even greater impact on countries nearer to it, such as its neighbor, Austria; they “share a border, and they also share a lot of violent history with many invasions back and forth,” the authors note. In this volume, Kelly and Laycock have done meticulous research, and it all shows on the page. With names such as Columbus, Polo, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte appearing over and over again, the authors help readers to grasp the big global picture at any given point in time. They also single out Italian-Americans, especially in the military, and their roles in history. An added bonus is an appendix featuring a colorful journal entry by Kelly’s great-grandfather Thomas Tileston Wells, written during an ill-timed vacation to Europe at the outbreak of World War I. Overall, Kelly and Laycock have created a dense, readable compilation about a nation whose impact on global history is often underappreciated.
A thorough, enjoyable collection which ably demonstrates Italy’s long reach.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-94-059872-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Book Publishers Network
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: HISTORY | MILITARY | GENERAL 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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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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