If much of what passes for foreign policy analysis is instant-formula baby food, this is the real thing and approaches developments in Russia over the past decade with refreshing if brutal candor. Simes, himself a Russian exile, was an advisor to Richard Nixon and arranged his last trips to Russia. It is a “profound misreading,” Simes contends, to think that the relationship with Russia will continue to be an “easy ride” for the US. Yeltsin’s reelection was not a “triumph of democracy,” and the Clinton administration does a significant disservice to the relationship and to its influence on Russia to pretend that it was. Indeed, Yeltsin has created a system in which “Al Capone would be more at home than Thomas Jefferson,” an oligarchy run by corrupt officials and industrialists which has alienated the people and done a rotten job of running the country. The bleakness of these views makes Simes’s own “cautious optimism” that much more surprising and perhaps persuasive. Despite an economic catastrophe in Russia more severe than the Great Depression in the US, he sees hope in the sheer extent of Russia’s resources, its well-trained labor force, its new entrepreneurial spirit, and the reluctance of the majority to contemplate a return to Soviet-style socialism. Which is not necessarily that good for the US: Simes believes that it is inevitable that Russia will increasingly direct its own path in foreign policy, particularly as it resolves its current economic difficulties, though for the time being it will be constrained by the need to retain Western support for its economy. He believes that the US, for its part, will need to show more understanding, more restraint, and less capriciousness in its foreign policy—which may be the one point at which the realism of the analysis becomes suspect. A bracing cold shower of a book, but all the more refreshing for it. (maps, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-82716-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
Categories: CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | WORLD | POLITICS | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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