Hard-hitting yet evenhanded, Taylor’s work holds tremendous relevance for our time.
A deeply compelling study of the peace enforced on Germany by the Allied victors at the close of World War II.
British historian Taylor (The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–1989, 2007, etc.) builds on the important work of Perry Biddiscombe and others in fashioning a more complete story of the messy “enforced transformation” of Germany after the demise of the Third Reich. Gen. Eisenhower had declared in 1945 that Americans came “not as liberators but as conquerors,” emphasizing the shared German guilt, yet in a 1995 poll more than half the German population still held to the notion that VE-Day was “a day of liberation.” Taylor carefully weighs the evidence on both sides, Allied and German, for a portrait of a terrible time and utterly traumatized populations: the Russians making their way into the eastern provinces of Germany in early 1945, speeding toward Berlin, “living witnesses of the fact that at least 25 million of their compatriots…had died in battle, or by massacre, and often by deliberate starvation” at the instigation of the Nazis, and in no mood for the niceties of prisoner treatment; and the despairing German civilians deserted and duped by Hitler, left to endure the onslaught of Russian revenge in the form of pillaging, mass rape, torture and murder. The Nazi propaganda machine had preyed on German anger at the bombings of German cities and the fear of Allied retaliation. Still, many Germans fled westward to be able to seek refuge in American and British hands, as news of Russian brutality spread. Those who survived the ravages of Stunde Null, “zero hour,” feared that Germany would simply cease to exist. While the Allied occupation and restructuring weren’t perfect, Germany in short order became an economic powerhouse, putting off a moral examination of their wartime conduct for a 20-year “sleep cure.”
Hard-hitting yet evenhanded, Taylor’s work holds tremendous relevance for our time.Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59691-536-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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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