A Russian scholar opens up new, even startling historical connections.
Fresh research at the Foreign Ministry in Moscow (since closed) yields an insightful new look at Russia’s pivotal role in the making of World War I.
In this massive yet palatable work of research, scholar Lieven (Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace, 2010, etc.), a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the British Academy, concentrates on Russian foreign policy as it maneuvered through shifting currents of “modern empire” and nationalism in the years leading up to Russia’s entry in the war. The author emphasizes how the notion of imperialism was as pertinent within Europe as outside of it, namely in Austria’s regard of Serbia as existing within its own orbit. Similarly, Russia was casting envious glances at Constantinople and the straits as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. Moreover, the fate of Ukraine—its population, industry, and agriculture—would tip the balance of European power as decisively then as it has today. Lieven engagingly sets out his history on two levels: the “God’s-eye view,” encompassing the big themes of geopolitics and balance of power; and the “worm’s-eye view,” which depicts how a handful of male leaders made the crucial decisions within a two-week period in July 1914, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, that would affect millions of people. Factors that fed international tensions included Germany’s paranoia regarding Russia and the sense of an inevitable war between “the Teuton and the Slav,” the role of the press as it “rattled and bedeviled policy makers,” the lack of trust in Czar Nicholas II, and the rise of ethnic nationalism. The Russian empire’s internal makeup was enormously complicated, and Lieven painstakingly walks readers through the important precursors—e.g., the revolution of 1905 and the Anglo-Russian entente of 1907—while introducing the key decision-makers.
A Russian scholar opens up new, even startling historical connections.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-670-02558-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Humorist and chronicler Frazier (Coyote v. Acme, 1996, etc.) returns to Indian country for an astute, personal, and disarmingly frank assessment of life and conflict among the Oglala Sioux on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Reintroducing a figure from Great Plains (1989)—Le War Lance, with whom the author has been friends for 20 years—Frazier explores his own affinity for the Sioux by relating the curious twists and turns of their friendship. A raconteur of the first rank as well as an alcoholic, Le has roamed from Hollywood to upper Manhattan, but is finally back home on the rez. Since Frazier’s own wanderlust has brought him and his family to Missoula, Montana, he often goes to visit Le. Over time, Le introduces his brother and sisters, uncle and aunt, even the graves of his parents and other brothers, endlessly spinning wild yarns that Frazier reproduces without judgment. Elements of tragedy (the girlfriend of Le’s brother is killed by a drunk driver) mingle with near-misses (a hose breaks at the distributor, enveloping the family in a cloud of propane gas), but all this is the normal state of affairs at Pine Ridge. As Frazier ponders the history of Indian bars locally and nationwide, or considers the treaty violation that allowed the US government to steal the Black Hills from the Sioux, he also finds resilience in the great-granddaughter of medicine man Black Elk, and hope in the remarkable story of SuAnne Big Crow, a teenage basketball hero who reunited her bitterly divided people by her example, and whose spirit still lives even after her death in a car crash in 1992. Frazier’s remarkably thorough and thoroughly eclectic study of one people in one place at a particular moment in time reveals as much about its author as its subject, and as much about “us” as “them.” (Photos, maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-22638-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
Weber (European History/UCLA; France, Fin de Siäcle, 1986; etc.) skillfully paints a somber portrait of France in decline. War and the threat of war shaped France in the 1930s. Though the nominal victor of WW I, France never recovered from losing over a million dead and over three million wounded. About the inert Depression-era French economy, Weber reflects that ``the spirit of Thomas Malthus ruled over the land.'' With a less dynamic economy and a significantly lower rate of postwar population growth than Germany, Italy, or Britain, France produced a succession of leaders, such as Edouard Daladier and LÇon Blum, who reflected the country itself: conservative, backward-looking, irresolute, and determined to avoid another war with Germany at all costs. Weber notes the familiar diplomatic, economic, and political indicators of France's decline in the 1930s—its fractured politics, its failure to oppose a resurgent Germany, the repudiation of its American debt from WW I, its fatal pacifism in the face of German aggression. But he focuses primarily on social and cultural history. A significant drop in the servant population, greater urbanization of what had been a predominantly agrarian economy, the falling value of the franc, and labor legislation all had transformative effects. Nonetheless, some things changed very slowly. The emancipation of women, Weber notes, was ``slow, patchy, and indirect,'' with women receiving the ability to take legal action without their husbands' consent only in 1938, and the vote in 1945. With France's decline as a great power, people became preoccupied with sports, films, and religion (Weber describes the religious revival of the period as the ``Indian Summer'' of French Catholicism); xenophobia and anti-Semitism became more pronounced as economic conditions worsened. In the end, the hollow years gave way to a war for which France was unprepared, and to years of occupation. An eloquent and thoughtful look at France in the interwar period.
Pub Date: Nov. 14, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03671-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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