A readable volume in the new Penguin History of Britain series (see also Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 16031714, p. 200) that not only brings British history up to date by incorporating the results of recent scholarship, but brings it up to the present as well. Recent history is a problem for historians because the passions of modern political and religious conflict have yet to subside. Yet Clarke (Modern British History/Cambridge Univ.) succeeds in handling the highly controversial regime of Margaret Thatcher with the same detached, judicious tone that he uses to explain complicated debates over tariff policy in the early years of the century. Clarke has mastered the art of the survey, covering as many topics as possible without losing track of the central story. High politics provides the basic narrative, but the reader is often reminded of the importance to the average person of diet, religion, death, literature, alcohol, sports, television, and the division of labor within the household. One might wish for a little more passion in the narrative, and a little more attention to the views of outsiders: working-class victims of mass unemployment or government means-testing, for instance, or lower-middle-class victims of selective education or snobbery. But Clarke's moderate tone complements his centrist political views and reinforces his view of 20th-century British history as a success story. There's no hand-wringing here about the empire's decline. The people of Britain, in his view, are now better off in nearly every respect than they were in 1900. With a higher standard of living and longer life expectancy, they are now free of the moral taint of holding an empire and prepared to join a prosperous and peaceful Europe. If all of Britain's wars were not ``good'' wars like WW II, their record is nonetheless more defensible than that of most other countries. If there is an air of self-satisfaction in this volume, Clarke provides ample justification for it.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-713-99071-6
Page Count: 454
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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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