History at its best: readable, dramatic and propelled by unforgettable principals.
Desperate sailors take over the Russian Navy’s premier battleship, hoping to use their mutiny as a catalyst for revolution and the overthrow of Nicholas II.
Bascomb (Higher, 2003, etc.) presents the gripping events of June 1905 with sharply focused immediacy and a flair for high drama. The mutiny aboard the Potemkin, which threatened the entire Black Sea Fleet, was eventually suppressed, but it helped sow the seeds of the Russian Revolution. In Bascomb’s capable hands, this powerful morality play vividly reminds us never to underestimate a handful of people willing to die for an idea. The mutiny’s leaders were committed, desperate men with an equally desperate agenda—to put an end to the oppressive autocracy that had embroiled Russia in a destructive war with Japan and made life even more unbearable for the nation’s peasants. A lowly seaman named A.M. Matyushenko planned the daring takeover with another subversive sailor, G.N. Vakulenchuk. The mutiny was successful, but events quickly turned bloody. With the Potemkin anchored outside Odessa harbor, the Russian army massacred sympathetic workers lining the piers. When a squadron of ships arrived to sink the Potemkin, the crew of a second battleship also mutinied, prompting the Russian commander to flee. But the rebellion eventually stalled, failing to spark the land-based revolution its leaders had hoped for. Bascomb recounts the unfolding events in a believable and authoritative voice. He gives equal attention to the military officials determined to ruthlessly crush the revolt and to Nicholas, who had for years blindly ignored the growing unrest within his empire. Stunningly, the Potemkin mutiny seems to have only temporarily jarred the autocratic complacency of a myopic ruler largely out of touch with the world beyond his gilded palaces. It showed those hungry for revolution that there were thousands of others waiting to join their cause.
History at its best: readable, dramatic and propelled by unforgettable principals.Pub Date: May 22, 2007
ISBN: 0-618-59206-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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