A solid survey of almost two millennia of Greek history, full of both aspirations for national unity and constant civil...
A comprehensive history of Greece from the reign of Constantine the Great to the end of the 20th century, written by former diplomat Woodhouse (The Struggle for Greece, 1941 – 1949, not reviewed).
Without falling prey to any pro- or anti-Greek political rhetoric, Woodhouse conducts an indiscriminate investigation of the factors that led first to the collapse of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 and then to the independence of Greece in the 1820s and subsequent conflicts. He demonstrates convincingly that the devastation of crusades on Constantinople contributed to long-term hostility between Eastern and Western Christendom, while the indifference of fellow Christian rulers to the destruction of Byzantium by the Turks made the Greeks' downfall inevitable. Woodhouse debunks many a myth about the Greeks' living conditions under the Ottoman Empire. While they (like all non-Muslims) had to pay special taxes, they enjoyed considerable freedom of religion, trade, and education. In fact, some Greek communities suffered more from their own Greek administrators than from Turkish oppressors. With Greek identity hard to define after years of dispersion, Greek independence resulted largely from the struggle for domination of the Balkans among external powers—mainly Russia, Britain, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire. Left to its own devices, independent Greece often slipped into the chaos of civil wars, political instability, and corruption. Delving into the concept of enosis (union) and the present deadlock in Cyprus, Woodhouse traces the conflict to British blundering, Greek expansionist moods, the treachery of the Greek Cypriot government and a lack of good will on the part of mainland Greece and Turkey.
A solid survey of almost two millennia of Greek history, full of both aspirations for national unity and constant civil discord. The material is dense, saturated with dates and names, and will probably be a hard nut to crack for the average reader. It is also unfortunate that the author completely neglected the last decade of the 20th century, as he finishes his account with Papanderou's defeat in the 1989 elections.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-571-19794-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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