Korda is a fluent storyteller with an eye for the ironies and political gamesmanship of the Battle of Britain. His book...
Spirited study of the world-changing aerial campaign waged nearly 70 years ago.
There have been many books about the Battle of Britain, including Patrick Bishop’s Fighter Boys (2003) and David E. Fisher’s A Summer Bright and Terrible (2005), to say nothing of Winston Churchill’s Their Finest Hour (1949). Historian Korda (Ike: An American Hero, 2007, etc.) picks up on a central part of Fisher’s story, namely the careful excision of Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding from the historical record. Dowding orchestrated the costly but ultimately successful defense of Britain against German bombing raids—successful, Korda asserts, because “Fighter Command was prepared for it,” unlike so many other air attacks in history past and present. Dowding is to be credited, by Korda’s account, for the development and installation of radar and two critically important aircrafts, the Hurricane and the Spitfire, but more for the intelligent organization of Britain’s air force into a flexible, carefully interlinked service quite unlike that of the German foe. Korda turns up surprises on the other side, too, including the initial reluctance of Hitler and Göring to drop bombs on civilian centers precisely because the British would answer in kind, thus risking morale among German civilians. Needless to say, the German leaders’ stance later changed, but both were deeply unhappy at the sort-of-accidental bombing of Croydon during the wave attacks of summer 1940. Korda even finds room to praise, faintly, the much-despised Göring: “nobody could deny his energy, his flair for publicity, or his lack of scruples in achieving his ambitions on the largest possible scale,” which included rebuilding Germany’s air force against international orders not to do so. That rebuilding, of course, is what allowed Germany’s blitzkrieg in the first place, a tide blunted but not halted by the RAF’s storied defense.
Korda is a fluent storyteller with an eye for the ironies and political gamesmanship of the Battle of Britain. His book isn’t quite required reading, as Churchill’s is, but it’s much fairer-minded.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-112535-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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