paper 0-8225-9680-6 A biography that highlights Ventura’s controversial gubernatorial campaign; unfortunately, the book spends too much time fawning over Jesse “the Body” and too little time analyzing what’s coming out of “the Mouth” for young readers to truly understand the man. Greenberg (The Haitian Family, 1998, etc.), who assisted Ventura with his column for World Wrestling Federation Magazine, chronicles his subject’s life from his working-class background in Minneapolis, through his career as a Navy SEAL, his wrestling stardom, and his political aspirations. The book fails to offer any opposing views of Ventura’s celebrity or policies, painting Ventura as an environmentalist for supporting Minnesota wetlands as mayor but omitting any mention of how he has weakened environmental prohibitions of jet skis (of which Ventura owns four). The book ends with Ventura’s election, so no mention is made of his comments on the Littleton, Colorado, shootings, nor—of course—of his recent remarks concerning organized religion, depression, etc. Researchers will be better served by current magazine and newspaper articles about the governor than by this unfettered bit of boosterism. (photos, source, bibliography, index) (Biography. 12-14)
Pub Date: Dec. 28, 1999
ISBN: 0-8225-4977-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Lerner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
Galloping history, despite the misleading title. (7 maps; 8 pp. b&w photographs, not seen)
A well-known BBC correspondent takes the career of Lt. Col. George Scovell, who cracked a complicated French cipher during the Peninsular Campaign of 1807–14, as an excuse to retell the rousing story of Wellington’s sanguinary preparation for the great test of Waterloo.
Urban, a former Army officer with a passion for the history of warfare, has added an important footnote to accounts of the Napoleonic Wars by giving Scovell, formerly an engraver’s apprentice, proper credit for his critical role in the British victories in Spain and Portugal. But the book’s title greatly misrepresents Urban’s focus. Yes, Scovell was accommodating enough to have left behind a journal and substantial notes, but these hardly suffice to fashion a biography. Instead, Scovell is a Zelig-like figure who appears at the verge of history’s grand photographs but is rarely front and center, a position invariably occupied either by Wellington (whom Urban clearly admires) or by his redoubtable adversaries in the field (including Napoleon himself in the short penultimate chapter on Waterloo). We begin in 1809 as the then–Capt. Scovell is serving lookout duty. His skills as a linguist and a fastidious organizer of men and matériel soon earn him promotions and the stern favor of Wellington, a man not noted for his warmth. We learn a little about Scovell’s wife, Mary (there is not much to learn), whom he does not see at all for one three-year period. Scovell organizes local guides and scouts (a daunting task) and begins to dabble with French ciphers, discovering in the process his own remarkable talent for code-breaking. Soon he is at work on the Great Paris Cipher, an extraordinarily difficult French code that occupies him for many months; indeed, it is not until near the end of the campaign that he understands it all. With partial foreknowledge of French intentions, Wellington has a decided advantage. Scovell’s post-Napoleonic career of 36 years consumes only a chapter.
Galloping history, despite the misleading title. (7 maps; 8 pp. b&w photographs, not seen)Pub Date: March 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-018891-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
GENERAL HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, his account of the war's origins, though surely arguable at many points, fills in many gaps.
If you listen closely, you can hear the guns of August blasting a decade and more before WWI actually began.
Fromkin (History/Boston Univ.; The Way of the World, 1999, etc.) delivers a thesis that will be new to general readers (though not to specialists): WWI came about because of the very different, but conveniently intersecting, ambitions of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, and the signs were evident long before the fighting began. The Habsburgs wanted to crush Serbia, which they (perhaps rightly) perceived to be a potent threat to Austro-Hungarian designs in the Balkans; the Austrian chief of staff “first proposed preventive war against Serbia in 1906, and he did so in 1908–9, in 1912–13, in October 1913, and May 1914: between 1 January 1913 and 1 January 1914 he proposed a Serbian war twenty-five times.” Just so, the Kaiser wanted to crush Russia, which he regarded as Germany’s one real rival for European dominance; war against Serbia would provide a useful pretext, though it wasn’t essential. Indeed, writes Fromkin, when a Slavic nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, the rest of Europe practically yawned; even Austria did not retaliate immediately, despite Germany’s urging to get on with the game. “Austria did not play its part very well,” Fromkin writes, and did not even bother declaring war on Germany’s enemies until some time after the war had actually begun. Similarly, Germany neglected to declare war on Serbia, “the only country with which Austria was at war and which, according to Vienna, was the country that posed the threat to Austria’s existence.” Fromkin’s notion that a pan-German conspiracy caused WWI is credible, even if the events he describes sometimes seem more a comedy of errors than a model of efficient militarism.
Still, his account of the war's origins, though surely arguable at many points, fills in many gaps.Pub Date: March 25, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41156-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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