Politics wonks will find much to chew on here, and sci-fi writers might find a few what-if moments to play with as well.
For want of iron will on the part of an assassin, John F. Kennedy lived a few years longer than he might have.
Such is the stuff of counterfactual history, which scholars are not supposed to engage in—but in which Greenfield (Oh, Waiter, One Order of Crow! Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History, 2001, etc.), a longtime TV journalist, revels. But this is not the “what if Custer had a helicopter” flavor of counterfactuality. Instead, the author offers three extensive and conjoined thought experiments centered on three turning points. In 1960, a suicide bomber failed to detonate his charge at president-elect Kennedy’s front door, deterred by the sight of his wife, Jacqueline. But what if he had carried out his mission? Lyndon Johnson would have become president, and the tenor of modern history might have changed with that mere shift of chronology. And who might he have chosen for vice president? After surviving a constitutional crisis mounted by a young William F. Buckley, Johnson might have named Bobby Kennedy, of course—though he might also have reached across the aisle to draft Nelson Rockefeller, “like Johnson…a Cold War internationalist” who relished any opportunity to face down the Russians. And then what? The Cuban Missile Crisis would have developed into an actual shooting war, including, for the first time since World War II, “nuclear weapons…employed in a military conflict.” And what would that have done to LBJ’s chances of being reelected? Greenfield unfolds scenario after scenario to show that history can turn on the smallest of moments, and then he examines the real historical record to ponder some of the attendant ironies.
Politics wonks will find much to chew on here, and sci-fi writers might find a few what-if moments to play with as well.Pub Date: March 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-15706-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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