Readable and provocative. Students of contemporary Irish history have few better guides than the sometimes-dyspeptic but...

VIVID FACES

THE REVOLUTIONARY GENERATION IN IRELAND, 1890–1923

A bracing study of the rebels who secured Ireland’s freedom from Britain nearly a century ago.

When it comes to people who once lived and breathed, Foster (The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland, 2002, etc.), perhaps the pre-eminent student of Irish history working today, is no hagiographer. Moreover, he does not subscribe to the great man theory of history. As he writes here, by way of prelude, one of his interests is to show “how a revolutionary generation comes to be made, rather than born.” Although Irish politics has been definitively sectarian, especially in its nationalist (or unionist) dimensions, the author observes that many of the first-generation rebels against British rule were Protestant; one, Alice Milligan, described herself as an “internal prisoner” of her family. In passing, Foster fruitfully compares the generation of rebels that brought on the Easter Uprising of 1916 to the Bolsheviks who overthrew the czar a year and a half later. While he notes that “this comparison should not be pushed too far,” it is useful to remember that the Irish, whether the comparatively conservative W.B. Yeats or the socialist Éamon de Valera, were not operating in a vacuum. As Foster charts the growth of the nationalist and revolutionary movements, the violence mounts. What had begun as a war of words and ideas soon took on armed force, so that, by the time of the first Republic, “ ‘soldiers’ and ‘politicians’ were already regarding each other suspiciously, and the implicit tension between moderate and extremist elements stretched to other issues besides that of separation from British rule.” By the end of Foster’s illuminating account, it is clear that the factionalism could only grow, to often tragic ends.

Readable and provocative. Students of contemporary Irish history have few better guides than the sometimes-dyspeptic but refreshingly agenda-less Foster.

Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2015

ISBN: 978-0393082791

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.

1776

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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