A lifetime of scholarship informs this highly readable analysis of what the author calls “the forgotten conflict.”
A scholar who has written often about 20th-century warfare (In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, 2005, etc.) returns with a comprehensive account of the many effects of World War I.
Reynolds’ (International History/Cambridge Univ.) theses are more intriguing than complicated. Although he reminds us continually of the dire human costs of the Great War—tens of thousands of soldiers died in the initial hour at the Battle of the Somme—his focus remains on how the war affected the principal combatants, especially his native England. England, he argues, entered the war not due to any threat of invasion or attack but for what he characterizes as moral reasons. He also reminds us that the United States entered the war very late (the spring of 1917) and did so not out of fear of attack (though some did occur on the seas) but also for moral reasons. Reynolds shows how the great prewar empires imploded during and after the war; the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, for example, and the consequent redrawing of maps in the Middle East have had enduring effects to the present moment. Reynolds also looks at the arts during and after the war—poetry (especially those wonderful British poets like Sassoon and Owen), fiction and film. Similarly, he examines how the various combatants honored their warriors, fallen and otherwise, and shows how countries dealt with the recent deaths of the war’s final veterans. He charts, as well, the involvement of Australia; shows how the war affected relations between England and Ireland (and Northern Ireland); and examines how the war affected the writing of history in various countries. We also see how the term “Great War” became “World War I.”
A lifetime of scholarship informs this highly readable analysis of what the author calls “the forgotten conflict.”Pub Date: May 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-08863-2
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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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