A ``late-twentieth century understanding of historical truth,'' outlined by three women historians, Appleby (History/UCLA), Hunt (History/UPenn) and Jacob (History/New School for Social Research). While there has been widespread discussion in the United States about the current state of academe, the supposed decline in its standards, and the prevalence of political correctness, there has not been much reflection, outside the profession, of what the authors call the ``ferocity of the current argument about how United States history should be taught.'' It is, the authors note, a controversy about values, objective knowledge, cultural diversity, and the nature of truth. The virtue of this book is that it makes a history of the study of history, particularly as it applies to the United States, more accessible to the general reader by turning a relatively dispassionate eye on the various schools of history that have prevailed: the protagonists of history as a science, the Frontier school, the Economic Interpretation School, the Marxists, the ``City on the Hill'' enthusiasts, the postmodernists, and the multiculturalists. The very prevalence of the different schools is, in itself, a caution against too heavy a reliance on any one of them, and the authors plump for ``the most objective possible explanations'' and the traditional narrative form of history. They believe passionately in the importance of what they are doing, in the ``intense craving for insight into what it is to be human,'' and reject those who are skeptical of the entire enterprise. The archives in Lyons, France, they note, are ``reached by walking up some three hundred stone steps. For the practical realists...the climb is worth the effort; the relativists would not bother.'' Underlying the argument, the authors contend, is ``the collapse on all fronts of intellectual and political absolutism,'' and they try to cut through the ``variety of noisy conversations'' with a more reasoned and less disputatious view. A tad tactful at times, and occasionally repetitive in noting the central role played by men in most historical accounts, but clearheaded, and often a pleasure to read.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03615-4
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
Not light reading but essential for policymakers—and highly recommended for the 40 million people who rely on the Great...
An alarming account of the “slow-motion catastrophe” facing the world’s largest freshwater system.
Based on 13 years of reporting for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, this exhaustively detailed examination of the Great Lakes reveals the extent to which this 94,000-square-mile natural resource has been exploited for two centuries. The main culprits have been “over-fishing, over-polluting, and over-prioritizing navigation,” writes Egan, winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. Combining scientific details, the stories of researchers investigating ecological crises, and interviews with people who live and work along the lakes, the author crafts an absorbing narrative of science and human folly. The St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of locks, canals, and channels leading to the Atlantic Ocean, which allows “noxious species” from foreign ports to enter the lakes through ballast water dumped by freighters, has been a central player. Biologically contaminated ballast water is “the worst kind of pollution,” writes Egan. “It breeds.” As a result, mussels and other invasive species have been devastating the ecosystem and traveling across the country to wreak harm in the West. At the same time, farm-fertilizer runoff has helped create “massive seasonal toxic algae blooms that are turning [Lake] Erie’s water into something that seems impossible for a sea of its size: poison.” The blooms contain “the seeds of a natural and public health disaster.” While lengthy and often highly technical, Egan’s sections on frustrating attempts to engineer the lakes by introducing predator fish species underscore the complexity of the challenge. The author also covers the threats posed by climate change and attempts by outsiders to divert lake waters for profit. He notes that the political will is lacking to reduce farm runoffs. The lakes could “heal on their own,” if protected from new invasions and if the fish and mussels already present “find a new ecological balance.”
Not light reading but essential for policymakers—and highly recommended for the 40 million people who rely on the Great Lakes for drinking water.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-24643-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
In this meticulously detailed and evocative book, history comes alive, and it isn’t pretty.
A meditation on Austria’s capitulation to the Nazis. The book won the 2017 Prix Goncourt.
Vuillard (Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business, 2017, etc.) is also a filmmaker, and these episodic vignettes have a cinematic quality to them. “The play is about to begin,” he writes on the first page, “but the curtain won’t rise….Even though the twentieth of February 1933 was not just any other day, most people spent the morning grinding away, immersed in the great, decent fallacy of work, with its small gestures that enfold a silent, conventional truth and reduce the entire epic of our lives to a diligent pantomime.” Having established his command of tone, the author proceeds through devastating character portraits of Hitler and Goebbels, who seduced and bullied their appeasers into believing that short-term accommodations would pay long-term dividends. The cold calculations of Austria’s captains of industries and the pathetic negotiations of leaders who knew that their protestations were mainly for show suggest the complicated complicity of a country where young women screamed for Hitler as if he were a teen idol. “The bride was willing; this was no rape, as some have claimed, but a proper wedding,” writes Vuillard. Yet the consummation was by no means as smoothly triumphant as the Nazi newsreels have depicted. The army’s entry into Austria was less a blitzkrieg than a mechanical breakdown, one that found Hitler stalled behind the tanks that refused to move as those prepared to hail his emergence wondered what had happened. “For it wasn’t only a few isolated tanks that had broken down,” writes the author, “not just the occasional armored truck—no, it was the vast majority of the great German army, and the road was now entirely blocked. It was like a slapstick comedy!” In the aftermath, some of those most responsible for Austria’s fall faced death by hanging, but at least one received an American professorship.
In this meticulously detailed and evocative book, history comes alive, and it isn’t pretty.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-969-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
GENERAL HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | MILITARY | HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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