The land of the rising sun is poised to rise again as a regional, and even world, power. So holds noted Japan specialist Pyle (History/Univ. of Washington).
Cultural relativists reject the notion of national character, but Pyle suggests that there is something in the homogeneous nation’s makeup that can be used to gauge the future. He approvingly quotes anthropologist Nakane Chie, who wrote, “We Japanese have no principles. . . . Except for a few leftists or rightists, we have no dogma and don’t ourselves know where we are going.” Pyle holds that this anyway-the-wind-blows pragmatism is a consequence of the leadership’s recognition long ago that Japan is a resource-poor island nation with very powerful neighbors; he writes that it has had many consequences, among them the only partial fulfillment of the postwar MacArthur equivalent of de-Nazification, since the American government feared that a resentful Japan, forced to acknowledge its bad and definitely ideological behavior, would wander into the Soviet camp. The lack of ideological firmness, by Pyle’s account, means that WWII was an aberration, “a sweeping rejection of the Japanese heritage” in the lust for national power. Chastened, Japan sat out most of the Cold War on the sidelines, Pyle writes, building economic strength in part by not having to shoulder the costs of defense. In the wake of 9/11, U.S. politicos have demanded that Japan pay those costs, which, ironically, may contribute to Japan’s revival as a power. Pyle observes that this revival is contingent on many factors and can take many forms, depending on the scenario—that old pragmatism again. For instance, an Asia with a reunified Korea will look very much different from the present one, particularly if Korea plays China off Japan. How will Japan react? And how will Japan respond if America does not remain “deeply engaged in East Asia and committed to maintaining a balance of power”?
The author does not doubt the revival itself. An interesting thesis, backed by a strong historical narrative.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-58648-417-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
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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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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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