An excellent study, taking a tiny instant of modern history and giving it specific weight, depth and meaning.
A sometimes improbable but nevertheless true tale of diplomacy and intrigue by bestselling author Larson (Thunderstruck, 2006, etc.).
William E. Dodd, the unlikely hero of the piece, was a historian at the University of Chicago in the early 1930s, tenured and unhappy, increasingly convinced that he was cut out for greater things than proctoring exams. Franklin Roosevelt, then in his second year in office, was meanwhile having trouble filling the ambassadorship in Berlin, where the paramilitary forces of Hitler’s newly installed regime were in the habit of beating up Americans—and, it seems, American doctors in particular, one for the offense of not giving the Nazi salute when an SS parade passed by. Dodd was offered the job, and he accepted; as Larson writes, “Dodd wanted a sinecure…this despite his recognition that serving as a diplomat was not something to which his character was well suited.” It truly was not, but Dodd did yeomanlike work, pressing for American interests while letting it be known that he did not think much of the blustering Nazis—even as, the author writes, he seems to have been somewhat blind to the intensity of anti-Semitism and was casually anti-Semitic himself. More interesting than the scholarly Dodd, whom the Nazis thought of as a musty old man, was his daughter Martha, a beauty of readily apparent sexual appetite, eagerly courted by Nazis and communists alike. The intrigues in which she was caught up give Larson’s tale, already suspenseful, the feel of a John le Carré novel. The only real demerit is that the book goes on a touch too long, though it gives a detailed portrait of a time when the Nazi regime was solidifying into the evil monolith that would go to war with the world only five years later.
An excellent study, taking a tiny instant of modern history and giving it specific weight, depth and meaning.Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-40884-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
SEEN & HEARD
A sobering and compelling narrative of calamity.
Pensive travels in the wake of one of the world’s most devastating recent disasters, the Tohoku earthquake of 2011.
As Parry (People Who Eat Darkness, 2012, etc.), Tokyo bureau chief of the Times of London, writes, Japan is readier than any other nation for disaster, especially earthquake. Tokyo buildings are meant to stand up to shaking, even if they’re highly flammable, and Japanese citizens have been drilled and know what to do. So, too, the author: “I had lived in Japan for sixteen years,” he writes, “and I knew, or believed that I knew, a good deal about earthquakes.” Yet, when the seafloor started shaking off the northeastern coast of Honshu on March 11, 2011, only a few experts could foresee what would soon unfold: the destruction of the nuclear reactor at Fukushima, the landfall of a wall of water 120 feet high, and a wave of death as people struggled to find safety on higher ground. An enterprising journalist, Parry visited the devastation in the immediate aftermath, and he recounts his experiences among grieving and dazed residents, many of those survivors having lost children as schools were swallowed up in seawater. The author’s narrative is appropriately haunted and haunting. One memorable moment comes when he describes someone brought back from the brink of madness by a perhaps unlikely method: namely, being sprinkled with holy water and thus freed from the hold of “the dead who cannot accept yet that they are dead.” Parry’s set pieces come to have a certain predictability: expert–victim–expert–survivor. Yet they retain their urgency, for, as he writes, it won’t be long before another earthquake of similar or even greater intensity strikes Tokyo proper, with its millions of inhabitants; in that event, “the Nankai earthquake, which might strike at any time, could kill more people than four atomic bombs.”
A sobering and compelling narrative of calamity.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-25397-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A simply written, sturdy addition to the groaning Napoleon shelves.
A history of Napoleon’s short first exile, rendered in short, punchy chapters.
The Treaty of Fontainebleau exiled the emperor to Elba and generously gave him sovereignty over the small island, which was rich in mineral deposits, featuring iron mines and good wine but poor soil. It certainly had no structure anywhere near sufficient to house the emperor. Accompanying him was Neil Campbell, a representative of England’s government who was directed to act as an impartial observer but not an enforcer. Campbell had no power or control over the emperor and spent a good deal of his time away with his mistress. Counting on his promised annual allowance, Napoleon was free to build houses and roads, develop commerce, maintain a navy and army, and even claim the nearby fertile land of Pianosa. He appointed a governor and treasurer and formed a council to establish the appearance of a constitutional monarchy. His mother and sister even joined him in exile. The terms of the treaty would prove to be its undoing, as Napoleon never intended to stay long, and nothing in the treaty proscribed his leaving the island. Louis XVIII, newly restored to the throne, had no intention of paying the annual allowance, and Campbell strongly warned the Allies that Napoleon was short of funds even though he tried to collect back taxes. Braude (Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle, 2016) wonders whether he would have stayed if he were sufficiently funded. Perhaps, but he was there only 10 months and left with a flotilla of armed vessels. It’s great fun reading about the Allies’ attempts to predict his destination, and those anecdotes reinforce our knowledge of the emperor’s great talents. His only mistake was leaving while the Allies were still gathered at the Congress of Vienna and able to quickly respond to his escape. Though not earth-shattering in his insights, Braude’s unique focus will allow this book to sit comfortably alongside the countless other Napoleon biographies.
A simply written, sturdy addition to the groaning Napoleon shelves.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2260-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
GENERAL HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | MILITARY | HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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