Persistent—and academic—readers will gather a wealth of knowledge. General readers may want to steer clear.
A scholarly narrative of the Vikings in King Alfred’s Britain, from the end of the 700s to the 950s.
The latest book from Adams (In the Land of Giants: A Journey Through the Dark Ages, 2016, etc.) is nothing if not informative—at least for students of the period. This will be slow going for those with only a mild curiosity about the subject matter, though consulting the author’s previous book(s) will help. Readers with a reasonable knowledge of the geography and a passing acquaintance with the characters will be most edified yet still challenged. The author is commendably strict on historical accuracy, especially regarding names: “I have tried as far as possible to render spellings in their original language for the sake of authenticity.” Lacking arable land and political stability, the Norse looked to the south for expansion. “As the eighth century draws to a close,” writes Adams, “bands of feral men, playing by a new set of rules and bent on theft, kidnap, arson, torture and enslavement, prey on vulnerable communities.” In Ireland and France, especially, the monasteries and settlements were ripe for the picking. “The economic strengths that made Britain such an attractive target lay in the exploitation…of abundant resources,” writes the author, who also provides a clever map of the Viking travels modeled on the London Tube system. He shows the waterways, roads, and Roman forts and their interconnections with existing Roman roads. The author greatly expands our knowledge of raids and the paying of Danegeld, the Viking land tax, and the division of Britain into Wessex/Mercia and the Danelaw; the split was the continental divide of Britain. King Alfred codified laws and controlled the Vikings, but it was his son-in-law, son, daughter, and grandson who finished the job. The text is impeccably researched and augmented with family trees, illustrations, and maps, but this is only for the most devoted fans of Vikings and their history.
Persistent—and academic—readers will gather a wealth of knowledge. General readers may want to steer clear.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-797-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Hoffman, author of the much-admired memoir Lost in Translation (1989), here returns to her dual roots, Jewish and Polish—and her history of the intertwined fates of the two peoples shows that they can indeed be complementary, not oppositional. Hoffman's goal is larger than her distillation of history- -acute and pointed, but a bit too schematic—can fully support. But her thesis is a fascinating one: that Poland, with historically large populations of Germans, Ukrainians, Jews, and other ethnic groups, was truly a multicultural society that can serve as an object lesson in how to achieve (or not achieve) a balance between minority group identity and ``a sense of mutual belonging.'' Where she does succeed fully is in her attempt to ``complicate and historicize the picture'' of Jewish-Polish relations in order to get beyond stereotyped views of Poles as congenitally anti-Semitic and of Jews as economic exploiters. Hoffman offers a nuanced view that excuses no act of hatred or violence yet considers, for instance, the difference between peasants' superstitious belief that Jews were lucky and genuine anti-Semitism, or how the endless conquering and division of Poland increased tensions and mistrust between Poles and Jews. Hoffman traces the history of Jews in Poland back to its origins in medieval times, before fervent Polish nationalism was born and the country was a beneficent refuge for Jews. She then focuses in on one shtetl, or village, Brask, as a microcosm of the waxing and waning of relations between the two peoples. In Brask, Polish peasants and Jewish craftsmen and merchants lived side by side: Poles attended cantorial concerts, and Jewish musicians played at Polish weddings; Poles incorporated Yiddish phrases into their speech, and Jews adopted the dress of Polish gentry. And yet, Hoffman concludes, each was seen as fundamentally ``Other.'' But Hoffman is optimistic that the gulf can be—and is being- -crossed. This insightful overview points out how we can begin to understand a complex past and apply those lessons in the future.
Pub Date: Oct. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-82295-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
Isaacs (Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia, 1983) covers a good deal of territory in this sober, strongly written, and persuasively argued book. According to the former Baltimore Sun foreign correspondent, the ``lingering legacies'' of the Vietnam War include a continuing impact on American veterans, on nonveterans of the Vietnam generation, and on American foreign and military policy, as well as the POW/MIA issue, Indochinese immigration to the US, US-Vietnam relations, and reconciliation efforts in this country. Examining those topics is a huge, complicated task, but Isaacs does so extremely capably. He amasses a large amount of solid information in each area, carefully analyzes it, and comes up with honest, insightful conclusions. In the chapter on veterans, for example, he serves up a mixture of previously published and original interviews, along with a catalog of factual data to back up his conclusions. These include a strong condemnation of Hollywood and the news media for consistently presenting stories of Americans perpetrating atrocities in Vietnam. That situation, he argues effectively, ``made a clichÇ of atrocities'' and unfairly portrayed veterans as ultraviolent misfits, causing many Americans for years to blame the veterans for the war. Elsewhere, Isaacs marshals a vast amount of evidence to buttress his contention that the widely held belief that Vietnam continues to hold American POWs is a myth. The majority of Americans still listed as missing in Vietnam, Isaacs says, were ``undoubtedly killed at the time they disappeared.'' It is ``virtually inconceivable that any [are] still alive,'' he says, nor will it ever ``be known exactly how or where'' they died. Those blunt conclusions are sure to be controversial, given opinion polls indicating that two-thirds of the public believes Vietnam continues to hold American prisoners. A valuable book that shows vividly how the Vietnam War continues to have a wide impact on American society.
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1997
ISBN: 0-8018-5605-1
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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