A valuable road map that shows us how we got where we are today.
A lucid history of the first decade of the 21st century, which set trends in motion that are with us today.
What to call that time? Washington, D.C.–based historian Peck dismisses “the aughts” as “too Victorian,” and he suggests that the “decade of disruption” is just about right to describe an era in which technology ravaged entire industries. He examines many other trends that seemed to happen overnight but that took years—e.g., the constantly threatened right of gay couples to marry, the rise of the tea party as a directly racist response to Barack Obama, and the still reverberating consequences of the Great Recession, among them the political polarization that reigns supreme today. Peck has a keen eye for the small but telling detail, such as the fact that Wall Street analysts were publicly promoting the dot-com boom but privately keeping their distance, aware that it was a bubble about to burst. (Make that two bubbles: the internet and the telecommunications sector.) The cynicism of Wall Street and Washington are constant threads, with “shareholder value” and giveaways to the already rich being the main ends of the denizens of both. Disruption holds sway throughout Peck’s narrative, but there are plenty of old-fashioned decadence and con games as well, from the fraudulent Trump University to Tiger Woods’ infidelities. By Peck’s account—and he’s a military veteran—the single greatest mistake of the decade was an act of hubris: “following a false trail of evidence and messianic zeal to overthrow a Middle Eastern dictator,” thus leading to the invasion of Iraq. In his nimble yet fact-dense account, the author enumerates many other errors, from gerrymandering and the expansion of the imperial presidency to the ideological sclerosis of the Republican Party and the destruction of the middle class.
A valuable road map that shows us how we got where we are today. (16 pages of color photos)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-444-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.
A popular novelist turns his hand to historical writing, focusing on what shipwrecks can tell us.
There’s something inherently romantic about shipwrecks: the mystery, the drama of disaster, the prospect of lost treasure. Gibbins, who’s found acclaim as an author of historical fiction, has long been fascinated with them, and his expertise in both archaeology and diving provides a tone of solid authority to his latest book. The author has personally dived on more than half the wrecks discussed in the book; for the other cases, he draws on historical records and accounts. “Wrecks offer special access to history at all…levels,” he writes. “Unlike many archaeological sites, a wreck represents a single event in which most of the objects were in use at that time and can often be closely dated. What might seem hazy in other evidence can be sharply defined, pointing the way to fresh insights.” Gibbins covers a wide variety of cases, including wrecks dating from classical times; a ship torpedoed during World War II; a Viking longship; a ship of Arab origin that foundered in Indonesian waters in the ninth century; the Mary Rose, the flagship of the navy of Henry VIII; and an Arctic exploring vessel, the Terror (for more on that ship, read Paul Watson’s Ice Ghost). Underwater excavation often produces valuable artifacts, but Gibbins is equally interested in the material that reveals the society of the time. He does an excellent job of placing each wreck within a broader context, as well as examining the human elements of the story. The result is a book that will appeal to readers with an interest in maritime history and who would enjoy a different, and enlightening, perspective.
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781250325372
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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