Surrounded by Bellesiles’ acerbic commentary, this is a useful, unsettling bottom-up history of America’s wars that...
Plenty of books record soldiers’ writings and interviews, but this one stands out modestly by sticking mostly to enlisted men.
Throughout history, writes Bellesiles (History/Central Connecticut State Univ.; 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently, 2010), working-class young men have enlisted in search of adventure or a paying job. Those in the United States have been no different except in one respect. From 1775 until the 20th century, Americans tended to consider themselves citizen-soldiers giving up their freedom to fight for liberty. As the author demonstrates, this patriotism was severely tested by the miseries of service; readers will squirm at accounts of ineptitude, racism, intolerance and atrocities. During the American Revolution and the War of 1812, soldiers were simply not fed or paid. In the Civil War and World War I, they were ordered forward in suicidal charges, and they knew it. WWII was not quite the “good war” of popular memory, but it enjoyed national support. This absence in Korea and Vietnam devastated morale. The elimination of the draft in 1973 eliminated the citizen-soldier, and civilians now view this all-volunteer force with worshipful admiration. Although now professionals, soldiers remain supersensitive to incompetent leadership and impossible missions. Ironically, civilians glorified fighting men but ignored veterans until they formed their own pressure group. Lobbying by the Grand Army of the Republic produced pensions for Union Civil War veterans, the largest federal budget expense for decades after the 1890s. The GI Bill of Rights remains the sole government entitlement program that no Republican would dare denounce.
Surrounded by Bellesiles’ acerbic commentary, this is a useful, unsettling bottom-up history of America’s wars that emphasizes the soldiers' mistreatment, suffering and injustice.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59558-628-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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