Like the war itself, a tough slog, but Herwig’s long-overdue revision of the history of the Marne will interest WWI...
An exhaustively documented account of the Battle of the Marne, the outcome of which would define the course of World War I.
Leading up to this disastrous encounter, German officials believed that invading neutral Belgium would allow them to quickly surround the French army and attack Paris from the rear. The reality proved otherwise, as the Belgian army put up a strong fight, exhausting the German troops prior to reaching France. The Marne was a devastating loss for Germany and a galvanizing victory for France, as a French loss would have meant the fall of Paris and subsequent exit from the war. While Herwig (History/Univ. of Calgary; co-editor: War Memory and Popular Culture: Essays on Modes of Remembrance and Commemoration, 2009, etc.) acknowledges the larger implications of the Marne to European history after 1917, he attempts to debunk the commonly held perception that the Germans choked at a key moment and that the French rallied to a dramatic and decisive victory. With an incredibly detailed retelling of the battle, the author proves a more complex truth: The Germans were worn down by repeated failures of communication and a crisis of leadership as compared to the relatively cool-headed French effort headed by commander Joseph Joffre. Yet Joffre by no means ran a flawless campaign, and his failure to drive the Germans completely out of France at the end of the battle enabled them to regroup along what became the Western Front. Herwig’s painstaking reconstruction of the events subverts any deeper analysis of the complex interplay between the multitude of German, French and Belgian forces. That information is relegated to the epilogue, leaving readers to wrestle with the facts and figures and their larger implications on their own.
Like the war itself, a tough slog, but Herwig’s long-overdue revision of the history of the Marne will interest WWI enthusiasts.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6671-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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
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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