A fine contribution to European history and Judaic studies alike.
A brilliantly conceived, nation-by-nation history of Europe’s Jews during the three decades before the Holocaust.
Almost as terrible as that genocide was the less well-known savagery unleashed on Jews in the early 20th century by the armies of kaiser, tsar, and commissar. In the first year of the Russian Civil War, for instance, the White Army of General Anton Ivanovich Deniken, who demonized Jews as antichrists and Bolsheviks, systematically burned and buried its victims alive, drowned them in wells, raped women, and mutilated children, killing more than 80,000 in Ukraine alone. Such events, writes Sachar (History/George Washington Univ.; Israel and Europe, 1999), did much to fuel the growth of the Zionist movement, which early on found considerable support from American Jews and an unlikely ally in the government of Poland. Some of the tension, the author notes, sprang from anti-Semitic nationalist movements, some from the redrawing of national boundaries after WWI that among other things placed 4.5 million non-Romanians under Bucharest’s rule, turning “an essentially homogeneous population into a complex mosaic of racial, cultural, and linguistic ethnicities that would determine the state’s future diplomacy and much of its domestic policies.” Repression was less violent for assimilated Jewish residents of such countries as Germany and France, though it was real all the same: wherever they lived, Sachar writes, “No people ever experienced more of the Old World’s underside.” Pages populated by the likes of Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Schnitzler catalogue Jews’ great contributions to European culture, deftly underscoring the failure of post-WWI Europe to sweep aside prewar inequities and make a real home for this long-suffering people.
A fine contribution to European history and Judaic studies alike.Pub Date: March 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40914-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The...
Former Secretary of State Clinton tells—well, if not all, at least what she and her “book team” think we ought to know.
If this memoir of diplomatic service lacks the preening self-regard of Henry Kissinger’s and the technocratic certainty of Dean Acheson’s, it has all the requisite evenhandedness: Readers have the sense that there’s not a sentence in it that hasn’t been vetted, measured and adjusted for maximal blandness. The news that has thus far made the rounds has concerned the author’s revelation that the Clintons were cash-strapped on leaving the White House, probably since there’s not enough hanging rope about Benghazi for anyone to get worked up about. (On that current hot-button topic, the index says, mildly, “See Libya.”) The requisite encomia are there, of course: “Losing these fearless public servants in the line of duty was a crushing blow.” So are the crises and Clinton’s careful qualifying: Her memories of the Benghazi affair, she writes, are a blend of her own experience and information gathered in the course of the investigations that followed, “especially the work of the independent review board charged with determining the facts and pulling no punches.” When controversy appears, it is similarly cushioned: Tinhorn dictators are valuable allies, and everyone along the way is described with the usual honorifics and flattering descriptions: “Benazir [Bhutto] wore a shalwar kameez, the national dress of Pakistan, a long, flowing tunic over loose pants that was both practical and attractive, and she covered her hair with lovely scarves.” In short, this is a standard-issue political memoir, with its nods to “adorable students,” “important partners,” the “rich history and culture” of every nation on the planet, and the difficulty of eating and exercising sensibly while logging thousands of hours in flight and in conference rooms.
Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The guiding metaphor of the book is the relay race, and there’s a sense that if the torch is handed to her, well….Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5144-3
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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