A clear, readable survey that strikes exactly the right tone of accessible scholarship.
A short history of Ireland from the 12th century to the present.
There is no real common denominator in Ireland’s history, Cronin (History/De Montfort Univ.) points out: events always move Ireland toward unity and disunity at the same time. The country is always being overrun by the British, and largely because of them there are two Irelands—one a republic and one a part of Britain, but both of them Irish and, in a lesser way, British. Cronin traces Catholicism in Ireland from its introduction by St. Patrick, pointing out that the Irish Church was essentially a loose confederation of monasteries existing in tandem with the rule of Irish Lords. The Church grew in strength as Ireland struggled to become a united nation, ironically inspired to unity by the invasions from England. Ireland was always an unruly province. Outright rebellion in the late 18th century brought the Act of Union, dissolving the Irish parliament and allowing the Irish seats in the British Parliament, but in the long run only fostering discontent. The potato famine brought fairer land laws from the British, and, of course, an Irish diaspora, but Irish discontent boiled over again in the late 19th century, resulting in the advocacy for home rule and, in 1920, the partition of the country through Ulster. Finally, Cronin discusses the present-day Catholic country of the Republic of Ireland and the strange entity of Northern Ireland, where the actions of Bill Clinton and George Mitchell were an important component of the uneasy peace.
A clear, readable survey that strikes exactly the right tone of accessible scholarship.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-333-65432-3
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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
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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