Taylor himself thought his life unimportant, and Burk can’t quite persuade us that it’s worth covering in this detail....
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the archives of three countries, and he loftily wrote off the Cambridge History of Foreign Policy as “now completely out of date.”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
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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