Dense but satisfying history of a time when “Britons were prodigiously energetic, industrious and creative, even as they...
The acclaimed British historian meticulously traces every aspect of Britain from the Act of Union (with Ireland) in 1800 until the 1906 landslide by the Liberal Party.
There is a danger of getting bogged down in the details, but diligent readers will find plenty of enlightenment here. British Academy president Cannadine (History/Princeton Univ.; Margaret Thatcher: A Life and Legacy, 2017, etc.) follows the period called the Pax Britannica, when Britain avoided military entanglements with European powers between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. England’s unique unwritten constitution provided the nation with an adaptable continuity while other nations were caught in the turmoil of revolution. In this period of tremendous upheaval in all the great European powers, Britain maintained government stability while engaging in unprecedented expansion. The Industrial Revolution and the Reform Act(s) enabled the country to wield a disproportionate influence over the affairs of the world. Revolutionary developments in industry and infrastructure encouraged population and agricultural booms as well as growth in the arts, writing in particular. However, at the same time, food prices rose, and exports were unreliable; there were bank panics and strikes by Luddites who feared the new mechanized looms. Of course, before all that could happen, England and other nations had to deal with Napoleon. By 1815, it had taken multiple coalitions of Dutch, German, Prussian, and Russian forces to defeat him. In the end, it was the Russian manpower and British economic advantage and naval supremacy that won the day. At that point, England had to pay the costs incurred in both the Napoleonic Wars and the American Revolution. Peace, new markets, income, property taxes, and customs and excise taxes helped tremendously. Territorial expansion was worldwide, with local governors deciding which areas to annex. Inevitably, the empire’s pre-eminence would buckle under its own far-flung reach. Ever adept, Cannadine shows us why and how it happened.
Dense but satisfying history of a time when “Britons were prodigiously energetic, industrious and creative, even as they were also in many ways a flawed and fallible people.”Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-55789-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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
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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