A detailed account of one of the world’s great battles, the fateful encounter between the fleets of Western allies and the Ottoman Empire.
In October 1571, the “Holy League,” made up of forces from Venice, Spain, the Papal States and elsewhere in Mediterranean Europe, sent a great armada against Sultan Selim II’s battle-hardened forces, agents of an undisguised program of imperial expansion and of jihad. For Italian historian Capponi, there’s no sweetening the latter term; as he writes, jihad implies “holy war on behalf of Islam,” as the massacre at Otranto, still resounding in Christian Europe, demonstrated all too clearly. Determined to stop the Ottoman push toward Rome and other key points, the Holy League’s forces gathered along the western coast of Greece and lured “the Lord Turk” into the straits off Lepanto. As Capponi records, the battle hinged on many factors, some unforeseeable. One was the steady improvement in Western military technology, armaments that brought shock and awe to the enemy, even though Capponi urges that it would not be for another century that technological superiority would prove decisive. Changes in military organization and command structure figured. Politics also played a part, and to read Capponi’s account is to be constantly surprised that the bickering allies could have pulled victory away from the monolithic Ottomans. Yet they did, in a fierce battle that cost the future novelist Miguel de Cervantes an arm and turned on one of the finest flanking maneuvers in naval history, a textbook case even today. Capponi provides enough geeky detail to satisfy a Tom Clancy fan, but this is a story told as a story, and he does well—especially in the matter-of-fact ending, in which the principal players in the battle, winners and losers alike, suffer the effects of politicking.
Illuminating reading for students of early modern European history.Pub Date: April 30, 2007
ISBN: 0-306-81544-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
Categories: HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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