An enticing survey of an era full of conflicts, some of which continue to affect present-day politics.
Schwartzwald, a clinical assistant professor at Brown University’s Warren Alpert School of Medicine, surveys European history from 1815 to 1945.
With the defeat of Napoleon I in the early 19th century, Europe had some restructuring to do. It was the goal of figures like the Austrian foreign minister and later Chancellor Klemens Wenzel von Metternich to “restore the old order and render it immune to a repetition of the turmoil so recently extinguished.” Of course, the turmoil was far from over and would reverberate during the next hundred-plus years. From 1815 to 1945 the great minds, leaders, and armies of Europe were hardly idle. The years covered saw fights for suffrage, exploration of the poles, and colonial disputes in Africa. Major conflicts ranged from the Crimean War to the Bolshevik Revolution to the Ottoman Revolution. This was also the time of the music of Claude Debussy, the artwork of Paul Cézanne, and scientific advancements such as Louis Pasteur’s germ theory. Many of the 20th-century portions of the book, however, involve World War I and World War II. Throughout it all, Schwartzwald paints an interconnected, bloody, and often uncomfortable portrait of how the Europe of the late 20th century emerged amid a welter of national conflicts, some of which continue to affect political debates. The emergence of a new Europe was far from a simple process. This broad survey from the author of The Rise of the Nation-State in Europe(2017) naturally covers a lot of ground, and some questions might have benefited from a more thorough explanation than it offers. How, for example, were the numbers of casualties recorded during different conflicts? How is it known that 1,000 (or perhaps 10,000) people were killed in an 1848 uprising in Paris? What exactly made William Osler’s Principles and Practice of Medicine“the standard medical textbook for decades”? Nevertheless, the overall timeline allows for a reasonable understanding of what happened and why. All told, the reader gets an edifying history even if some details fall by the wayside.
An enticing survey of an era full of conflicts, some of which continue to affect present-day politics.Pub Date: May 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4766-8340-9
Page Count: 455
Publisher: McFarland
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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