by Michael S. Neiberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 3, 2016
A valiant attempt to dispel “America’s collective amnesia over the First World War.”
A fresh look at America’s reluctance to enter World War I as a mass consensus rather than any single faulty decision by President Woodrow Wilson.
Neiberg (War Studies/United States Army War Coll.; Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe, 2015, etc.) effectively shows how America went from embracing neutrality when World War I ignited in August 1914 (as represented by the popular song “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier”) to accepting its new world role by early 1917 (epitomized by George M. Cohan’s “Over There”). The author admirably sticks to the contemporary record via periodicals, diaries, and speeches to allow the voices of the agents to emerge—politicians, captains of business, immigrants of the warring nations, and regular folk. Americans were outraged by the brutality of the war in Europe, mystified and disgusted by the bellicosity of Germany (when so many immigrants to America were German, and German kultur was valued highly), and increasingly cognizant of the need to accept moral responsibility to help the war’s victims. “Wilson had misread the mood of his country regarding the war,” writes the author, because many people did question the rightness of America’s isolationism as imperiling their future. While a pro-Allied bias was evident from the start of the war (by more educated, old-stock Protestant families), many did not sympathize—e.g., Irish-Americans, who denounced the violent British reprisals against the Easter Rising as being similar to German methods; and African-Americans, who were keenly aware of Belgium’s atrocities against the Congolese in Africa. Economic interest, however, ruled the day; the sinking of the Lusitania and, later, the Zimmermann telegram shook public opinion violently, though it was Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare that helped create the inevitable casus belli.
A valiant attempt to dispel “America’s collective amnesia over the First World War.”Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-046496-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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by Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
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