The life of “possibly the greatest, and certainly the most famous, diplomatic historian of the twentieth century,” by a former research student now teaching at London University.
Taylor may already be receding into the mists of history, the very mists he did so much to dispel, but Burk ably captures not only his importance but also the flavor of his pugnacious and epigrammatic style. In his history of the Habsburg monarchy, Taylor was the first to use the archives of three countries, and he loftily wrote off the Cambridge History of Foreign Policy as “now completely out of date.” He produced many major works of diplomatic history and hundreds of essays, but he also irritated his less productive colleagues by writing some 1,600 book reviews and becoming the first “television don”—delivering one or more series of lectures, by himself and without notes or prompters or film footage, every year for ten years. His contention that Hitler should be seen not as an aberration but as part of the pattern of German statesmanship stirred up a profound controversy—which Taylor relished. He dismissed a criticism by the Regius Professor of History at Oxford that his Origins of the Second World War would harm Taylor’s reputation as a serious historian by retorting that the methods of quotation used by the Regius Professor in his review would harm his own reputation as a serious historian “if he had one.” Taylor’s great contribution, one that influenced a generation of diplomatic historians, was to emphasize the fundamental and enduring influences in the behavior of states, and to pay less attention to accident and chance.
Taylor himself thought his life unimportant, and Burk can’t quite persuade us that it’s worth covering in this detail. Still, Taylor’s contribution to the intellectual history of this century makes this account fascinating and valuable.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-300-08761-6
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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