An impressively researched, cogently argued reinterpretation of World War II diplomatic relations.
A historical work examines World War II diplomacy through the lens of a Canadian prime minister’s diary.
As the leader of Canada’s governing Liberal Party for nearly three decades and as prime minister through the entirety of World War II, Mackenzie King was “a vital link” between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. King’s 30,000-page typed diary provides a unique perspective on the American president and the British prime minister, who was loath to admit he needed a mediator between himself and Roosevelt. The diary challenges the prevailing notions, largely crafted by Churchill himself, of American and British diplomacy during the war. As a professor emeritus of history at the University of Western Ontario, Thompson expertly parses the voluminous diary and convincingly demonstrates that King, who was present during closed-door conversations, knew Roosevelt and Churchill “better than they knew each other.” Indeed, while Roosevelt and Churchill put on public faces of unity, strengthened by their mutual talents for rhetorical eloquence, behind the scenes both men had different visions of the postwar world. Whereas Churchill clung to past imagery of a benevolent yet dominant British Empire, Roosevelt saw the war as an opportunity to build a new world order. King’s accounts of conversations between the three range from lofty debates over the postwar landscape to more mundane discussions of “democratic management” of their respective cabinets and legislatures. They also deliver revealing personal details, such as King’s concerns over Churchill’s drinking habits that included half a bottle of brandy a day. By placing King as “The Third Man” alongside Roosevelt and Churchill, the book tells the Canadian leader’s own story as a man who felt “more at home in London, Washington, or New York” than he did in Toronto or Ottawa. Additional insights into Canada’s paradoxical history as both an American neighbor and member of the British Commonwealth receive keen analysis. But there is a noticeable absence in themes relating to racism, from Churchill’s views on the sustained colonization of Africa to Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese Americans.
An impressively researched, cogently argued reinterpretation of World War II diplomatic relations.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-989555-26-2
Page Count: 498
Publisher: Sutherland House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL NONFICTION
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
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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