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AN ATLAS OF EXTINCT COUNTRIES

Name: AN ATLAS OF EXTINCT COUNTRIES
Author: Gideon Defoe
ISBN: 978-1-60945-680-1

by Gideon Defoe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 8, 2021

A droll, tongue-in-cheek view of history best taken in small doses and with a grain of salt.

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Historical sketches of 48 countries that no longer exist.

“Countries die,” writes Defoe on the first page. “Sometimes it’s murder. Sometimes it’s an accident. Sometimes it’s because they were too ludicrous to exist in the first place.” The author, who admittedly uses the term country broadly, provides brief, often humorous summaries not intended to provide a comprehensive, scholarly examination of extinct countries. The book contains a mixture of familiar nations and “countries” that many readers may have never known existed (Poyais, Khwarezmia, the Free State of Bottleneck, the Great Republic of Rough & Ready, etc.). Although Defoe offers a clever perspective, the satirical tone occasionally misses the mark. Regarding the Kingdom of Bavaria (1805-1918): “Every morning, Ludwig II, the fourth king of Bavaria, would have his barber tease out his hair into a weird bouffant that made his head look massive.” The Principality of Elba (1814-1815): “It had been a rough few years and, like desperate parents sticking an iPad in front of their difficult toddler, the great powers of Europe decided to give the recently vanquished Emperor Napoleon a little country of his own to play with.” The author’s irreverent, often biting style captures numerous unsettling elements of world history. “The Confederate States of America hasn’t been a thing for a century and a half,” he writes, “but that doesn’t stop cowardly Nazis (in those parts of Europe where the swastika is banned) from using the Confederate flag as a coded bumper sticker.” And: “The new Kingdom of Yugoslavia, barely out of its bubble wrap, first fell apart in World War II. Croatia enthusiastically hooked up with the Axis powers. So enthusiastically in fact, that the Nazis found the Croat massacres of the Serbs a bit hard to stomach (compared to their own, much neater genocides).” It’s not Niall Ferguson, but it fits the historical facts.

A droll, tongue-in-cheek view of history best taken in small doses and with a grain of salt.

Pub Date: June 8, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-60945-680-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Europa Compass

Review Posted Online: April 1, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021

Categories:

HISTORY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
THE PIRATES! IN AN ADVENTURE WITH NAPOLEON
by Gideon Defoe

- BOOK REVIEW
THE PIRATES! IN AN ADVENTURE WITH AHAB
by Gideon Defoe

- BOOK REVIEW
THE PIRATES! IN AN ADVENTURE WITH SCIENTISTS
by Gideon Defoe

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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GHOSTS OF HIROSHIMA

by Charles Pellegrino ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 5, 2025

This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.

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A story of ordinary people, both victims and survivors, thrown into extraordinary history.

Pellegrino says his book is “simply the story of what happened to people and objects under the atomic bombs, and it is dedicated to the hope that no one will ever witness this, or die this way, again.” Images of Aug. 6, 1945, as reported by survivors, include the sight of a cart falling from the sky with the hindquarters of the horse pulling it still attached; a young boy who put his hands over his eyes as the bomb hit—and “saw the bones of his fingers shining through shut eyelids, just like an X-ray photograph”; “statue people” flash-fossilized and fixed in place, covered in a light snowfall of ashes; and, of course, the ghosts—people severely flash-burned on one side of their bodies, leaving shadows on a wall, the side of a building, or whatever stood nearby. The carnage continued for days, weeks, and years as victims of burns and those who developed various forms of cancer succumbed to their injuries: “People would continue to die in ways that people never imagined people could die.” Scattered in these survivor stories is another set of stories from those involved in the development and deployment of the only two atomic weapons ever used in warfare. The author also tells of the letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard to Franklin D. Roosevelt that started the ball rolling toward the formation of the Manhattan Project and the crew conversations on the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, the planes that dropped the Little Boy on Hiroshima and the Fat Man on Nagasaki. We have to find a way to get along, one crew member said, “because we now have the wherewithal to destroy everything.”

This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.