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
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Peukert, who died in 1990 at age 39, also wrote Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life. This new book is not quite everyday life under the Weimar Republic, but it does shift the emphasis from the doings of a few old men—the military elite who handed the country over to Hitler—to the prevailing anguish among all classes of Germans during the 12 years the Republic survived. Peukert sums up this anguish as ``the crisis of classical modernity.'' He notes that, since 1870, Germany had already been subjected to an accelerated process of modernization: industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization, rationalization of daily life. Dislocations that were mild and bearable under the prosperous empire became killers in the Weimar years, after military defeat and with two horrendous economic crises in ten years. Weimar, in short, was not something completely new in German history. It was more of the same under impossible conditions. Peukert offers new angles on the period, all designed to show that it wasn't some fatal flaw in the German character that produced Hitler, but a series of complex problems all striking at once. Demographics, for example: A baby boom in 1900-10 flooded the job market just at the start of the Depression, and the Nazis recruited heavily among these young unemployed. Peukert also points out surprising continuities between Weimar and what followed. Laws against abortion and homosexuality never came off the books in those supposedly freewheeling years. Women who were married weren't supposed to work, were even fired from civil-service jobs. Nazi race madness was anticipated by a concern for eugenics by both the right and the left, going back decades. Writing to amplify and correct other historians, Peukert is dense, allusive, and sometimes crabbed. This is definitely not Weimar for beginners, and perhaps is best read as part of Germany's process of VergangenheitsbewÑltigung—coming to terms with the past. Or as a warning of how long stretches of hard times can bring out the worst in people.
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8090-9674-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
Two history professors (Shea: Univ. of Arkansas at Monticello; Hess: Lincoln Memorial Univ.) offer an absorbing analysis of an important early conflict in the Civil War. Though often regarded as having only peripheral strategic importance, the battle of Pea Ridge (Arkansas), the authors explain, led to Union control of Missouri and dominance of the entire trans-Mississippi region. In early 1962, a large Confederate army, assisted by a pro-Confederate governor and a secessionist state guard, posed a serious threat to Missouri's membership in the Union. As the pro-Confederate state-guard commander began an apparent retreat to obtain supplies and support from the regular Confederate army, Union forces under Samuel Curtis (who in turn was commanded by Henry W. Halleck) launched an aggressive offensive drive. Confederate President Jefferson Davis appointed Earl Van Dorn, a dashing but untalented general, as overall Confederate commander—but though Van Dorn attempted to gain the initiative, what should have been a major Confederate threat to Missouri turned instead into a Federal invasion of Arkansas when Curtis's men- -marching lightly and far from Union supply lines—attacked rather than fall back into Missouri. During the fighting at Pea Ridge (March 6-8, 1862)—which was really more a strategically unified series of separate battles than a single engagement—Curtis kept the Confederate forces separated and ultimately drove them from the field. And by the authors' account, Halleck—who is not often treated kindly by historians—emerges as the unlikely hero who conceived the vigorous Federal strategy. After the battle, Van Dorn transferred his army to the eastern side of the Mississippi, allowing the Union to contain Confederate forces there. Shea and Hess rightly contend that this early Union victory, won ``in the springtime of northern hopes,'' secured Federal domination of the Mississippi region. A thoroughly researched and well-told account of an important but often neglected Civil War encounter. (Eighteen maps.)
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1992
ISBN: 0-8078-2042-3
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
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