A brilliant compendium of everything-you-didn’t-know-about World War I, which, for many readers, will be a great deal.
A World War I–focused history of 1916, when “all the major belligerents…stepped up to regulate domestic manpower and mobilize all sectors of the community behind the war.”
The title is not entirely deceptive because it was a genuinely global war. Jeffery (British History/Queen’s Univ., Belfast; The Secret History of MI6: 1909-1949, 2010) makes this clear in 12 long, unconnected, richly detailed, and always fascinating chapters, each with a geographic focus. Following chronology, each chapter begins with an event from that month—February: Verdun; April: the Irish Easter Rebellion; November: the United States presidential election; December: the murder of Rasputin—but moves quickly to larger, more or less related topics. Thus, June saw the Brusilov Offensive, Russia’s greatest victory but one that produced the usual unwelcome consequences. It persuaded Romania to join the Allies, a coup that turned into disaster as German-led forces quickly overran the country. This action “crucially accelerated the political and social destabilization of both the Russian and Habsburg empires, if not the German empire too.” In August, Rhodesian and Indian troops captured Morogogo, the colonial seat of German East Africa. Although trumpeted as a victory, it accomplished little because German and African forces, under the leadership of the skilled Gen. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, remained intact, continuing to provide troublesome opposition to superior forces until their surrender two weeks after the armistice. Though widely dismissed as a sideshow, World War I transformed Africa. More than 1 million black men served as both soldiers and laborers, and upward of 200,000 died; opposition to recruitment produced several rebellions that were brutally suppressed but marked the beginning of organized opposition to European rule.
A brilliant compendium of everything-you-didn’t-know-about World War I, which, for many readers, will be a great deal.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62040-269-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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
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
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