Rogan (Modern History of the Middle East/St. Antony’s Coll., Oxford Univ.; The Arabs: A History, 2009, etc.) corrects Western assumptions about the “sick man of Europe.”
In this well-researched, evenhanded treatment of the Ottomans’ role in World War I, especially in its assessment of the Armenian genocide of 1918, the author delineates the urgent internal and external causes spurring the crumbling Turkish empire to seek a defensive alliance with Germany and counter Britain, France and Russia when war broke out in 1914. The coalition of fiery Young Turks had risen against the aging autocratic sultan and demanded a restoration of the constitution in 1908, but during the tumult, they allowed Turkey’s European neighbors to annex more territory. Russia’s territorial ambitions were most feared, while Britain and France could not be trusted. The war became a “global call to arms” for all parties, with the Ottomans declaring a jihad in order to unite Muslims. Rogan walks through the “opening salvos” of the war, at Basra, Aden and Egypt, showing the vulnerability of the Ottoman defenses; yet the Ottomans showed enormous spirit and ingenuity against the Entente assault on the Dardanelles in February 1915. Rogan elucidates the Allied debacle at Gallipoli—although the lack of maps is frustrating—a reckless campaign he blames more on Lord Kitchener than on Winston Churchill and which provoked a government crisis back in Britain. The dire campaigns in Mesopotamia, Suez and Palestine were not a “sideshow” to be dismissed by the Allied planners in their hopes for a quick victory over a weak Ottoman Empire. Actually, they produced—through the Arab Revolt galvanized by T.E. Lawrence and the drafting of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration—an uneasy armistice and partition that promised to be deeply divisive for another century.
An illuminating work that offers new understanding to the troubled history of this key geopolitical region.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-02307-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | MILITARY | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
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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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. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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