A winning combination of scholarly tome and readable history, examining the portentous events culminating in the ``August Revolution'' of 1945, when Ho Chi Minh declared the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Marr (Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 19201945, not reviewed, etc.) learned the Vietnamese language as a US Marine Corps intelligence officer in 1961. He went to Vietnam the next year, then studied its history and society at graduate school in the United States before becoming a senior fellow at the Australian National University's Research School of Pacific Studies. He has scrutinized an astounding number of official documents in Vietnam, France, and the US and has interviewed many of the important players in Vietnam's postWW II history. All that work reaches fruition in this book, which tells the historically important story of the end of Japanese occupation of Vietnam and the short-lived takeover of the country by Ho Chi Minh's revolutionary Viet Minh in August 1945. Marr successfully navigates his way through the dense web of competing and contentious factions in postwar Vietnam: the occupying Japanese army; the defeated French civilians and colonial bureaucrats; the weak Vietnamese government of Emperor Bao Dai; the communist-dominated Viet Minh; the disparate group of anticommunist Vietnamese nationalists; the nationalist Chinese; the British army; the handful of American OSS agents on the scene to help fight the Japanese; and the various French officials working under orders from General Charles de Gaulle to recolonize Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia) as soon as possible. Marr tells this extremely complicated story very well, backing up his sharp analysis with mountains of supporting factual evidence. He portrays Ho Chi Minh as a fervently anticolonial nationalist who looked in vain for help from the US based on vague American promises to work against French recolonization. Meticulous and objective, an indispensable document for understanding the roots of American involvement in Vietnam. (32 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-520-07833-0
Page Count: 587
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.
A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe.
For his tenth book, science writer Kelly (Three on the Edge, 1999, etc.) delivers a cultural history of the Black Death based on accounts left by those who witnessed the greatest natural disaster in human history. Spawned somewhere on the steppes of Central Asia, the plague arrived in Europe in 1347, when a Genoese ship carried it to Sicily from a trading post on the Black Sea. Over the next four years, at a time when, as the author notes, “nothing moved faster than the fastest horse,” the disease spread through the entire continent. Eventually, it claimed 25 million lives, one third of the European population. A thermonuclear war would be an equivalent disaster by today's standards, Kelly avers. Much of the narrative depends on the reminiscences of monks, doctors, and other literate people who buried corpses or cared for the sick. As a result, the author has plenty of anecdotes. Common scenes include dogs and children running naked, dirty, and wild through the streets of an empty village, their masters and parents dead; Jews burnt at the stake, scapegoats in a paranoid Christian world; and physicians at the University of Paris consulting the stars to divine cures. These tales give the author opportunities to show Europeans—filthy, malnourished, living in densely packed cities—as easy targets for rats and their plague-bearing fleas. They also allow him to ramble. Kelly has a tendency to lose the trail of the disease in favor of tangents about this or that king, pope, or battle. He returns to his topic only when he shifts to a different country or city in a new chapter, giving the book a haphazard feel. Remarkably, the story ends on a hopeful note. After so many perished, Europe was forced to develop new forms of technology to make up for the labor shortage, laying the groundwork for the modern era.
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000692-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
A feast for students of ancient history and budding historians of any period.
A delightful new translation of what is widely considered the first work of history and nonfiction.
Herodotus has a wonderful, gossipy style that makes reading these histories more fun than studying the rise of the Persian Empire and its clash with Greece—however, that’s exactly what readers will do in this engaging history, which is full of interesting digressions and asides. Holland (In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire, 2012, etc.), whose lifelong devotion to Herodotus, Thucydides and other classical writers is unquestionable, provides an engaging modern translation. As Holland writes, Herodotus’ “great work is many things—the first example of nonfiction, the text that underlies the entire discipline of history, the most important source of information we have for a vital episode in human affairs—but it is above all a treasure-trove of wonders.” Those just being introduced to the Father of History will agree with the translator’s note that this is “the greatest shaggy-dog story ever written.” Herodotus set out to explore the causes of the Greco-Persian Wars and to explore the inability of East and West to live together. This is as much a world geography and ethnic history as anything else, and Herodotus enumerates social, religious and cultural habits of the vast (known) world, right down to the three mummification options available to Egyptians. This ancient Greek historian could easily be called the father of humor, as well; he irreverently describes events, players and their countless harebrained schemes. Especially enjoyable are his descriptions of the Persians making significant decisions under the influence and then waiting to vote again when sober. The gifts Herodotus gave history are the importance of identifying multiple sources and examining differing views.
A feast for students of ancient history and budding historians of any period.Pub Date: May 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02489-6
Page Count: 840
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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