Michener and staff have produced a collage, now appearing in the Reader's Digest, of graphic second-hand accounts, reconstructions of student life and town sentiment, interpretations and misinterpretations of the Kent State events of May 1970. About the shooting itself, the book says the Guard was not surrounded; no order to shoot was given; there is no evidence of a sniper and much evidence that the Guards were not all afraid for their lives. It was, however, "not murder," but "a tragic accident": a "riotous condition," if not a real riot, prevailed, and Michener insists that hard-core revolutionaries were out to force a confrontation, as if their intent proves their responsibility. This claim is backed up chiefly by testimony that people with NLF flags were standing on the sidelines and yelling revenge slogans afterward. Coeds' profanity, which receives countless repetitive references, assumes the proportions of a second major cause; Cambodia itself and the national pattern of uprisings are given infinitely less weight. On the one and foremost hand, Michener stresses campus visits by SDS leaders over the years, and at psychologically key points he interpolates nonsense about Cuban funding of SDS (his most highly praised source is Eugene Methvin, ultraconservative author of The Riot Makers) and about radical plans to make Kent a regional focus of their efforts. In other spots he acknowledges that the campus "straights" were passionately anti-war and anti-draft, that many moderates were glad to see the ROTC building burn, and that "disorders" were "much, much worse" on other Ohio campuses. There are long pontifications about how the "new life style" touches the most apolitical students, along with an equation between life-style and "Marxist-based" worldwide student revolt. In his descriptions of the teaching assistants, so inflammatory as to invite further witch-hunts, as in his imputation of uncanny powers to the activists, Michener is making mischief; but especially in the epilogue he covers himself with a plea to spare peaceable radicals and junior faculty for the sake of free-flowing ideas. As a work of interpretive journalism, it is far less scrupulous than I. F. Stone's Killings At Kent State (1970).
Pub Date: April 30, 1971
ISBN: 0449202739
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1971
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.
A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe.
For his tenth book, science writer Kelly (Three on the Edge, 1999, etc.) delivers a cultural history of the Black Death based on accounts left by those who witnessed the greatest natural disaster in human history. Spawned somewhere on the steppes of Central Asia, the plague arrived in Europe in 1347, when a Genoese ship carried it to Sicily from a trading post on the Black Sea. Over the next four years, at a time when, as the author notes, “nothing moved faster than the fastest horse,” the disease spread through the entire continent. Eventually, it claimed 25 million lives, one third of the European population. A thermonuclear war would be an equivalent disaster by today's standards, Kelly avers. Much of the narrative depends on the reminiscences of monks, doctors, and other literate people who buried corpses or cared for the sick. As a result, the author has plenty of anecdotes. Common scenes include dogs and children running naked, dirty, and wild through the streets of an empty village, their masters and parents dead; Jews burnt at the stake, scapegoats in a paranoid Christian world; and physicians at the University of Paris consulting the stars to divine cures. These tales give the author opportunities to show Europeans—filthy, malnourished, living in densely packed cities—as easy targets for rats and their plague-bearing fleas. They also allow him to ramble. Kelly has a tendency to lose the trail of the disease in favor of tangents about this or that king, pope, or battle. He returns to his topic only when he shifts to a different country or city in a new chapter, giving the book a haphazard feel. Remarkably, the story ends on a hopeful note. After so many perished, Europe was forced to develop new forms of technology to make up for the labor shortage, laying the groundwork for the modern era.
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000692-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
A feast for students of ancient history and budding historians of any period.
A delightful new translation of what is widely considered the first work of history and nonfiction.
Herodotus has a wonderful, gossipy style that makes reading these histories more fun than studying the rise of the Persian Empire and its clash with Greece—however, that’s exactly what readers will do in this engaging history, which is full of interesting digressions and asides. Holland (In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire, 2012, etc.), whose lifelong devotion to Herodotus, Thucydides and other classical writers is unquestionable, provides an engaging modern translation. As Holland writes, Herodotus’ “great work is many things—the first example of nonfiction, the text that underlies the entire discipline of history, the most important source of information we have for a vital episode in human affairs—but it is above all a treasure-trove of wonders.” Those just being introduced to the Father of History will agree with the translator’s note that this is “the greatest shaggy-dog story ever written.” Herodotus set out to explore the causes of the Greco-Persian Wars and to explore the inability of East and West to live together. This is as much a world geography and ethnic history as anything else, and Herodotus enumerates social, religious and cultural habits of the vast (known) world, right down to the three mummification options available to Egyptians. This ancient Greek historian could easily be called the father of humor, as well; he irreverently describes events, players and their countless harebrained schemes. Especially enjoyable are his descriptions of the Persians making significant decisions under the influence and then waiting to vote again when sober. The gifts Herodotus gave history are the importance of identifying multiple sources and examining differing views.
A feast for students of ancient history and budding historians of any period.Pub Date: May 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02489-6
Page Count: 840
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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