A collection of erudite and provocative essays that examine the synthesis of Jewish history and memory. Vidal-Naquet, an eminent French classicist, has a vision of history that is ``strictly antilyrical,'' with Thucydides and Proust representing dueling visions of memory and history. The essays stretch out over two millennia, from the fall of the Second Temple to Baruch Goldstein's Hebron massacre, with threads of zealotry and anti-Hellenism linking the extremities. The author emphasizes the Jewish civil wars of the period, reminding us how the Maccabean revolt against the Assyrian Greeks, too, began with internecine violence. The Qumram zealots who rejected a Hellenized Israel are compared to today's anti-Zionist Neture Karta sect of Hasidim. The collection's focus on memory versus history pits Josephus' practicality against the zealotry of Masada, just as the Warsaw Ghetto's historian, Emmanuel Ringelblum, is set off against its heroic warrior-suicide, Mordecai Anielewicz. If the book battles historical lyricism, it does so with lyrical statements like: ``Between time lost and time rediscovered lies the work of art. The challenge to which [Lanzmann's] Shoah subjects historians lies in the obligation it places on them to be at once scholars and artists.'' Vidal-Naquet lashes into Robert Faurisson's argument that the Holocaust was a Zionist hoax, calling it so much ``intellectual excrement.'' But the historian of classics is on less certain ground in discussing Middle East affairs, with vapid comparisons of the massacres at Deir Yassin and Shatila-Sabra and pronouncements about Jerusalem being an Arab capital. The 42 pages of notes here attest to how well-rounded a scholar Vidal-Naquet is, but the collection leaves one with the feeling that he is a fine Jewish historian—for an authority on ancient Greece.
Pub Date: April 4, 1996
ISBN: 0-231-10208-9
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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