Though Kershaw doesn’t offer a wealth of new material, this is a terrific roundup by a trusted historian, featuring an...
The second installment of the eminent English historian’s comprehensive overview of modern European history.
Kershaw’s latest, following To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 (2015), is equally as massive as the previous volume, as he explores “the most striking legacy of the war for the immediate post-war world,” which was “twofold: Europe was not a continent divided down the middle by the Iron Curtain; and the new age was a nuclear era, with both of the superpowers in possession of super-weapons of mass destruction.” The astounding advances in material wealth and medical well-being across Europe, thanks to the miraculous economic recovery from the war, were accompanied by provincial attitudes that would take another generation to explode. These included blatant race-based discrimination; increased influence of Christian churches; and intolerance regarding homosexuality, women’s rights, and abortion, among other human rights concerns. While the Soviet Union was pursuing dominance over its satellite nations (“The Clamp” is Kershaw’s chapter title), Europe was developing a middle class well into the 1970s (“Good Times”), encompassing the newly modernized life enjoyed by postwar parents. The baby boomers, however, took their parents to task (“Culture after the Catastrophe”), asking questions about their participation in World War II, agitating against the Vietnam War and general anti-imperialism, and often exploding into violence, as in the student riots in Paris in 1968 and the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany. Kershaw sees 1973 and the Arab oil embargo as the tipping point, when the price of gas soared and the economy tanked. “Change was on the way,” he writes. “But the oil crisis was a massive accelerant.” The author notes that in 1950, oil had provided 8.5 percent of Western Europe’s energy supplies, while 20 years later, it had risen to 60 percent. In the latter portion of the book, Kershaw directs his considerable talents to the fall of the Berlin Wall, reunification of Germany, and the “global exposure” of newly vulnerable Europe.
Though Kershaw doesn’t offer a wealth of new material, this is a terrific roundup by a trusted historian, featuring an extensive bibliography for further reading.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2398-1
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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