A revelatory history of America’s grasp for power.
A lively exploration of how “intervene first, ask questions later” became America’s foreign policy beginning with the Spanish-American War.
In 1898, Cuba’s fight for independence from Spain captured the American imagination, inflamed by sensational newspaper reports and dispatches by well-regarded journalists. Many believed that Cuban rebels were starving, perishing on America’s doorstep, and it was the responsibility of the U.S. to intervene “in the name of humanity.” Although President William McKinley and his administration were reluctant to interfere, others pressed for war, the noisiest among them Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s views prevailed, and his name and fortune became forever linked to a volunteer regiment known as the Rough Riders, whose exploits fed into America’s self-image of courage and invincibility. Drawing on letters, archival sources, and abundant newspaper articles—many from on-site journalists including Richard Harding Davis, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris—Risen (Single Malt: A Guide to the Whiskies of Scotland, 2018, etc.), deputy op-ed editor at the New York Times, offers a penetrating history of the “half-baked, poorly executed, unnecessary conflict” from which the U.S., nevertheless, emerged victorious. Due to the nation’s limited army and ill-prepared state militias, the war relied on volunteers; many eagerly joined Roosevelt’s “cowboys,” which took its nickname from one of Buffalo Bill Cody’s touring troupes. The Rough Riders were shocked by the reality of Army life: Malodorous cattle ships, refitted to transport troops, teemed with insects; on the island, they lacked food, water, cooking utensils, supplies, medicine—and decisive leadership; malaria, typhoid, and yellow fever raged. Moreover, Cubans were resentful, seeking guns, money, and ammunition—not America’s “rescue.” Although the intervention lasted less than six months, America battled on for another four years, in the end controlling Puerto Rico and part of the Philippines. The war, Risen argues convincingly, shaped the nation’s sense of unity, purpose, and role as an exporter of American values, establishing “the wheels of myth-making, idealism, and national self-interest that would guide the country during the twentieth century.”
A revelatory history of America’s grasp for power.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4399-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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