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
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Bibliophiles will love this fact-filled, bookish journey.
An engaging, casual history of librarians and libraries and a famous one that burned down.
In her latest, New Yorker staff writer Orlean (Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, 2011, etc.) seeks to “tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine.” It’s the story of the Los Angeles Public Library, poet Charles Bukowski’s “wondrous place,” and what happened to it on April 29, 1986: It burned down. The fire raged “for more than seven hours and reached temperatures of 2000 degrees…more than one million books were burned or damaged.” Though nobody was killed, 22 people were injured, and it took more than 3 million gallons of water to put it out. One of the firefighters on the scene said, “We thought we were looking at the bowels of hell….It was surreal.” Besides telling the story of the historic library and its destruction, the author recounts the intense arson investigation and provides an in-depth biography of the troubled young man who was arrested for starting it, actor Harry Peak. Orlean reminds us that library fires have been around since the Library of Alexandria; during World War II, “the Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books.” She continues, “destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never happened.” The author also examines the library’s important role in the city since 1872 and the construction of the historic Goodhue Building in 1926. Orlean visited the current library and talked to many of the librarians, learning about their jobs and responsibilities, how libraries were a “solace in the Depression,” and the ongoing problems librarians face dealing with the homeless. The author speculates about Peak’s guilt but remains “confounded.” Maybe it was just an accident after all.
Bibliophiles will love this fact-filled, bookish journey.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4018-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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