A pleasure for students of Texas history, and a fine complement to Randolph E. Campbell’s more complete Gone to Texas (p....
A sturdy survey of early-19th-century Texas history and the “Texican” struggle for independence.
Brands (History/Texas A&M; The Age of Gold, 2002, etc.), one of the most fluent of narrative historians, spins a good yarn, strong on colorful characters and situations. He even adds a few subtle shades to the exceptionalist interpretation of Lone Star State history, which paints the place as a sort of promised land. Perhaps, Brands rejoins, but Texas was a frontier for a long time after its discovery, an empty place: “To find Texas,” he writes, “one had to be looking for it.” Yet for the hardscrabble farmers of Tennessee, “where the stony ridges and thin soil tested the patience of even the Jobs among the plowmen,” the fertile soil of the Texas bottomlands promised paradise, and the entrepreneurs who recruited them to accept Mexican citizenship and colonize the place made a comfortable living from the place, too—never mind the fact that plenty of people with longer pedigrees had their own claims to the land. Brands doesn’t offer much new in the way of fact, but his narrative is fluent and even entertaining, and it gives and strips away credit as is due. Stephen Austin, for instance, emerges as a somewhat slippery character who began his Texas career as a naturalized Mexican citizen opposed to “mad schemes of independence,” so much so that he denounced would-be rebels to the authorities; Antonio López de Santa Anna earns points for bravery, even as he “distracted his compatriots from their domestic problems by reopening the Texas war” in 1842, several years after most books about the Alamo end; and so forth. There are a couple of false notes here and there—slavery seems almost an accident, for instance—but on the whole, Brands’s account is as good as any in the literature.
A pleasure for students of Texas history, and a fine complement to Randolph E. Campbell’s more complete Gone to Texas (p. 726).Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-50737-2
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
A spectacular, startling, and sometimes downright grisly chronicle, in words and pictures, of a bloody and tumultuous period. Alongside a stunning battery of photographs scoured from archives and collections throughout the former Soviet empire, the vast majority of them unfamiliar, Moynahan (Comrades, 1992) unfolds a history short on depth but told in crisp, imagistic (not to say strongly opinionated) prose. To his great credit, he persistently strives to include not only the obvious historical milestones— wars, revolutions, terror, famine, and the like (every horseman of the apocalypse gallops across the tortured steppes)—but also some sense of the evolving everyday sensory and emotional realities of Russian life under czar, dictator, and infant democracy. In this, he's not only immeasurably aided but inevitably outshone by the pageant of superbly reproduced photographs to which every reader will be immediately drawn and which, highlighting the human figure at the expense of landscape, run the gamut from imperial family portraits and staged Party propaganda scenes to snatched samizdat documents of ghetto and gulag, to the innovative high art of Rodchenko. Behind the familiar official faces of the masters- -Rasputin's manic stare, Trotsky's compelling gaze, Stalin's sly squint, Yeltsin's pugnacious querulousness—and the distortions of official history, both amply evidenced here, the photos unearth a vast parade of their nameless subjects (and, more often then not, victims)—``ordinary'' workers, peasants, soldiers, priests, shopkeepers. Too often it's a gallery of the unquiet dead: These pages are as corpse-strewn as the history they record—slain in purges, pogroms, insurrections, invasions, by starvation or single bullet, piled high by roadsides, dumped into mass graves, even, most shockingly and indelibly, filleted on the dining table of famine-stricken peasants driven to cannibalism. No mere coffee-table ornament, but a historical document of great drama and unusual intensity.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42075-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
The story of an Israeli Jew's experiences as a mole inside Germany's radical right. In September 1992 Svoray was an out-of-work fortune hunter and sometimes journalist searching Germany for diamonds stashed and then lost by an American GI 37 years before. By accident, this quixotic hunt led Svoray to an aging neo-Nazi who took a liking to him and became his conduit to the German far right: unrepentant Nazis from the Third Reich, murderous young skinheads, and modern right-wing ideologues and politicians. Svoray forgot the diamonds and became an investigator for the Los Angelesbased Simon Wiesenthal Center, an organization established to combat anti- Semitism. Somehow, the neo-Nazis failed to penetrate Svoray's flimsy cover as a reporter for a nonexistent right-wing American publication and an advance man for a wealthy American looking to contribute to neo-Nazi movements. Further, Svoray managed to talk his way into right-wing strongholds in heavily accented English. Svoray and Taylor (A Necessary End, p. 131) tell the story of the Israeli's 18 months among the neo-Nazis. It is a fascinating, frightening, and revealing account, but one that is also badly flawed by the decision to write the book in the third person with Svoray as the hero/protagonist. The device turns In Hitler's Shadow into a tale of high adventure, complete with narrow escapes and moments of high danger, rather than investigative journalism. Svoray gathered important information about a movement that many critics charge has been paid insufficient attention by the German government, and the wide news coverage given Svoray's investigation may have contributed to Germany's recent crackdowns against neo- Nazis. (HBO will bradcast a tie-in movie in 1995.) An imperfect but riveting inside view of Germany's neo-Nazi movement and the dangers it presents. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 6, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-47284-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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