In this regard, Bain offers useful footnotes to points raised by New Western historians such as Patricia Nelson Limerick and...
A slide show of a family trip west, with learned captions.
Bain (English/Middlebury Coll.) had plenty of reasons for heading westward: he’d written about the expansion of the American frontier in Empire Express (1999), an epic of the transcontinental railroad; he’d long been an ardent admirer of Mark Twain, whose spirit infused Bain’s first work, “and of course he had popped up again and again, like a hitchhiker, all along the old iron road.” Plus, he wanted to show his family the places he’d seen in the course of his research and was thus “seized with the idea of taking them out West.” The resulting travelogue, which mainly follows the old Emigrant Trail from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to San Francisco, doesn’t add up to much; it lacks the emotional investment, the hunger for self- and other-discovery, of comparable long-distance spins by, say, William Least Heat-Moon and Jonathan Raban, and it covers decidedly unexotic ground that would challenge even a top-flight storyteller—say, Ian Frazier, the laureate of the Plains. Yet Bain writes pleasantly enough, and he turns up sufficient historical oddments to please any fan of the Great American Road: the fact that Omaha, Nebraska, “is the birthplace of Marlon Brando, Malcolm X, and Fred Astaire, an unlikelier trio one could not hope to find but one that in a decidedly contrary way reflects on the city itself”; the curious career of the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer, whose 19th-century visions of the prairie must have induced many a romantic to make the journey there; the still more curious career of Jake Eaton, late of Grand Island, the “champion gum chewer of the world”; the birth of the Myth of the West in the work and persons of exemplars such as Owen Wister and Gary Cooper.
In this regard, Bain offers useful footnotes to points raised by New Western historians such as Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard White. Otherwise, not much more than a slide show for those who were there.Pub Date: May 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03308-1
Page Count: 446
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Harris (Thatcher, 1988, etc.) provides a dreary if competent chronological summary of Queen Elizabeth II's life and role in British history. Long live the queen. Elizabeth has ably and nobly represented the monarchy for more than 40 years. As her family gets sordid and scandalous press, she plods on, sovereign of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, with the duke of Edinburgh, if not exactly by her side, then a few paces behind her. Harris dutifully summarizes the queen's duty-filled history; he explains and defends the institution of the monarchy; he talks about the monarchy's mystique and about the disagreement between those who would keep it magical and those who would make it more accessible. Regrettably, this virtuous survey does not make very interesting copy, and Harris provides little new material. He traces the queen's sense of obligation and morality back to her father, George VI, the shy and reluctant king who ascended the throne in 1936 after the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII. We see ``Lillibet'' as a child and follow the royal family through the Second World War, when they became a beloved symbol of Britain's courage and fortitude. Harris then dutifully and soberly traces Elizabeth's marriage and coronation; her sister Margaret's ill-fated romance with Peter Townsend; the queen's relationships with her various prime ministers; her children's scandalous marriages; the annus horribilis, etc., etc.—all in order, with some pretty rough transitions. More interesting is the discussion of the queen's role as arbitrator and consensus maker in the Commonwealth; much less so are ones about her income, her staff (why ladies-in-waiting are not black), the European Community, and monarchic reformation. Harris's history seems intended for an unsophisticated audience, but some terms (e.g., the Privy Council, the Annual Register, the queen's prerogative) may be unclear to Americans. A royal rehash that's a royal bore.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-11878-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
At a time when a whirlwind has demolished the Soviet Union, a musty smell of old academic disputes pervades these essays and lectures by a veteran Sovietologist. Lewin (History/Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Gorbachev Phenomenon, 1988, etc.) seeks to describe the changes that transformed Russia from a rural to an urban country, and in particular to account for the rise of the bureaucratic state, which achieved its apogee after Stalin's death. He has many useful insights: He believes that, just as Hitler's worldview was shaped by his experiences in the First World War, so Stalin's view of state coercion as the secret of success—with its use of mobilization, propaganda, military might, and terror—was derived from the Civil War period. He believes that the Civil War dealt ``a severe blow to the libertarian aspirations of the makers of the 1917 revolutions,'' although recent discoveries in Moscow's archives seem to show that Lenin was prepared to use the most draconian methods right from the start. Lewin's insights are diminished by his repeated claim that what happened in the Soviet Union was neither ``socialism,'' nor ``communism,'' nor ``Marxism'' and by his insistence that what happened in other communist countries doesn't really fit such a description either. Throughout, Lewin seems hesitant to call things by their proper names. We read of Stalin's ``whimsical despotism'' and of the ``regrettable loss'' of the pre-revolutionary leadership. Most disappointing is his failure to explore the reasons for what he declines to call the fall of communism. It would have been useful to have had more insight into why the system died ``from natural causes.'' A pity that, with a brand-new car more or less on the road, Lewin has been content to tinker with the old model.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56584-123-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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