Often perceptive but never groundbreaking.
Profiles of eight “supremely significant” male world leaders, from virtuous to genocidal.
Mandelbaum, author of The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth, The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy, and other books of global history, writes that these men changed the world during the 20th century—largely the first half, a disastrous period featuring history’s two most destructive wars and its worst economic depression. Since this is political history, beginning with Woodrow Wilson is reasonable. His idealistic vision of a world in which democracy and self-determination replace power politics failed after World War I, but it caught on after 1945—peaking during the Cold War but steadily receding since. The remaining seven choices are unsurprising. Readers may grumble at Stalin’s absence, but Mandelbaum makes a convincing case that Lenin deserves priority for leading an obscure splinter party to power in the collapsing Russian empire and creating the institutions and vicious mindset that Stalin inherited. Most readers will agree with the inclusion of Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Mao Zedong. Gandhi did more than any individual to make India a nation and launched the worldwide collapse of colonialism following World War II. David Ben-Gurion was the central figure in the creation of Israel, which still plays an outsize role in world affairs. History buffs will encounter little new information but enjoy the insights of a fine historian. Older readers will experience the uneasy sensation that there is less than meets the eye in the great victory of WWII. Mandelbaum casts a gimlet eye on all his subjects. The five democratic leaders come off better than Lenin, Hitler, and Mao, but he does not deny the increasing appeal of hyperpatriotic autocrats who are now taking power around the world—legally, the author reminds us, just as Hitler did.
Often perceptive but never groundbreaking.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780197782477
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.
The bestselling author recalls her childhood and her family’s wartime experiences.
Readers of Winspear’s popular Maisie Dobbs mystery series appreciate the London investigator’s canny resourcefulness and underlying humanity as she solves her many cases. Yet Dobbs had to overcome plenty of hardships in her ascent from her working-class roots. Part of the appeal of Winspear’s Dobbs series are the descriptions of London and the English countryside, featuring vividly drawn particulars that feel like they were written with firsthand knowledge of that era. In her first book of nonfiction, the author sheds light on the inspiration for Dobbs and her stories as she reflects on her upbringing during the 1950s and ’60s. She focuses much attention on her parents’ lives and their struggles supporting a family, as they chose to live far removed from their London pasts. “My parents left the bombsites and memories of wartime London for an openness they found in the country and on the land,” writes Winspear. As she recounts, each of her parents often had to work multiple jobs, which inspired the author’s own initiative, a trait she would apply to the Dobbs character. Her parents recalled grueling wartime experiences as well as stories of the severe battlefield injuries that left her grandfather shell-shocked. “My mother’s history,” she writes, “became my history—probably because I was young when she began telling me….Looking back, her stories—of war, of abuse at the hands of the people to whom she and her sisters had been billeted when evacuated from London, of seeing the dead following a bombing—were probably too graphic for a child. But I liked listening to them.” Winspear also draws distinctive portraits of postwar England, altogether different from the U.S., where she has since settled, and her unsettling struggles within the rigid British class system.
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64129-269-6
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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