TWENTIETH CENTURY

            The venerable British historian (A History of Europe, 1997, etc.) explores the labyrinth of our century, from 1901 (“a world deeply unlike our own”) to the Clinton impeachment and the Kosovo conundrum.

            Roberts acknowledges that this formidable piece of scholarship, synthesis, and exposition is “a reconsideration of facts established by others,” then moves gracefully and seamlessly across continents and cultures, through decades and debacles, to produce not a snapshot of the 20th century but a comprehensive album of deeply moving pictures.  Weighty enough to bend the sturdiest shelf, his volume nonetheless reads easily (thanks in part to many emollient subheadings) and presents, for the most part, a disinterested view.  Roberts’s great strength as a narrator is his ability to identify the cultural myths that people embrace, myths that have inspired as well as retarded human progress.  He reminds us, for example, that the concept of nationhood is a fairly recent one, and though it has helped map the modern world, it has also proved inadequate in many unstable parts of the globe, like the Balkans and the Middle East.  Roberts is careful to consider many far-flung areas, and thus we learn not only about the origins of the great European wars, the emergence of the US as a global power, and the fall of European Communism, but developments in China, the Indian sub-continent, Korea, Japan, and Africa.  At times Roberts states the obvious (he reports that the Internet provides a “personal mail system”); at times he cannot conceal his own biases (he characterizes the bizarre 1982 Falkland War as “a major feat of arms”); sometimes he is insensitive (he condemns the “stridency” of American feminists); and sometimes he simply errs (he blames Eugene rather than Joseph McCarthy for the Communist witch-hunts).

            Taken all in all, however, an illuminating work of scholarship by a skilled and savvy historian.  (14 maps, not seen)