A rigorous, sharp survey of this decisive moment in the war.
Suspenseful chronicle of the 12 days in December 1941 that would define the perimeters of the global conflagration.
Mawdsley (Professorial Research Fellow/Univ. of Glasgow; World War II: A New History, 2009, etc.) embarks on the action from the first day and never lets up in this crisp, chronological study—from the Japanese Imperial Conference’s ratification of war on Dec. 1 against the United States, Britain and the Netherlands, setting in motion the Southern Operation invasion, to Germany’s declaration of war on the U.S. on the 11th. In between, Hitler’s lightning thrust into the Soviet Union was now mired in mud and the approaching winter. In Libya, the British under General Ritchie were driving General Rommel and his Italian allies back from securing the supply port at Tobruk. Yet the essential crisis at this moment was gathering steam in Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands, with the launch of the Japanese invasion convoy on Dec. 4, which struck Malaya and southern Thailand, Singapore, Pearl Harbor, Wake, Guam, the Philippines and Hong Kong. Mawdsley has an excellent grip on the behind-the-scenes political and diplomatic scurrying among London, Washington, Berlin and Tokyo, much of it desperate and, to readers in hindsight, smugly blinkered, as Japan’s hostile intentions were not hidden and the Allies had broken the Japanese encryption in 1940. Crucial code warnings received by U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark were not delivered to the Pacific commanders in time. Pearl Harbor brought America into the war, bolstering Britain and turning the tide. Hitler announced in a Dec. 12 speech his resolve to “clear the table” of the Jews; a week later he had taken direct command of the German Army.
A rigorous, sharp survey of this decisive moment in the war.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-300-15445-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
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
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