It’s hard to imagine a better, more up-to-date history of its subject.
A concise history of one of the most fateful developments in modern history: the creation of a united Germany from a clutter of smaller existing jurisdictions.
At the center of the first half of Hoyer’s story is Otto von Bismarck. The head of state of the nation created in 1871 after the German states had crushed France in the brief Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck was the driving force behind the governing of Germany until 1890. Born in that conflict under Prussian leadership, a newly united Germany, gradually ridding itself of regional loyalties, built itself into Europe’s most powerful industrial and military power in a mere 40 years. Then, Hoyer argues that because of the failure of Kaiser Wilhelm II and his ministers to prevent his nation’s march toward another war, it suffered the devastating carnage of World War I. While failing to relate the full complexity of that war’s outbreak as other historians now understand it, the author astutely portrays how, by the early 20th century, budding German democracy was sidelined in favor of “a silent dictatorship of the military.” But this superb book isn’t simply about government and war. Hoyer roots the gathering unity of the German states in a “defensive nationalism” caused by the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century and skillfully unveils how nationalism can come into being out of a sense of comparative inferiority. The author covers social, cultural, and religious developments under two Hohenzollern monarchs, especially Bismarck’s path-breaking social legislation of the 1870s and ’80s. She also deftly analyzes the emergence of Germans’ sense, not yet fouled by racial assumptions, of themselves as a distinct people, although her resistance to the argument that Bismarck’s and his successors’ aspirations and achievements led inexorably to the future rise of Hitler will be rejected by some.
It’s hard to imagine a better, more up-to-date history of its subject.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64313-837-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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