A thick, meticulously researched volume that looks at whether some of the nation’s major conflicts could have been avoided.
Windchy has been looking into the origins of war ever since he explored the catalyzing event that led to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War in Tonkin Gulf (1971). In this new book, the former policy analyst again tackles Vietnam and other historic conflicts, such as the Civil War and World War I, as well as more obscure ones, including the First and Second Barbary Wars and the Second Opium War. (Other than Vietnam, Windchy doesn’t discuss wars after WWI, although most of them would certainly fit into his theme.) The national security expert lays his cards on the table early: “Only three of these twelve wars were unavoidable. In the nuclear age, we need to do better.” His thorough research shows through on these pages, particularly in the footnotes and extensive bibliography, making this history a dense read. In fact, in the longer chapters, it’s sometimes frustratingly difficult to keep track of all the players. Still, Windchy doggedly lays out the whole tapestry of each war and caps each chapter with analysis and a verdict of whether that war could have been headed off at an earlier stage. He even offers useful principles, such as, “If you do not want a war, do not put troops of antagonistic nationalities next to each other in a disputed territory.” Windchy’s goal seems to be to prove conspiracies in America’s involvement in these wars and, more broadly, to help prevent its entry into potential future conflicts, which are all too common in modern times. In his “Afterthoughts,” he writes, “Question is, can we learn from history? Or as [writer George] Santayana feared, must we repeat our crimes, follies and misfortunes again and again?” Through painstaking analysis, Windchy succeeds in creating a work that will be reaffirming for some, shocking for others and thought-provoking for all.
A chilling summary of what’s been behind the United States’ entrances into several wars over the country’s relatively short history.
Pub Date: July 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491730553
Page Count: 430
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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