A more streamlined narrative would have been welcome. All the same, a solid contribution to the literature of World War II,...
Overlong history of Europe between 1914 and 1945, the age of totalitarian empires and what Gellately (History/Florida State Univ.) (Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 2001, etc.) calls “the great catastrophe” whose origins lie in Leninism.
Solzhenitsyn would approve, and so would the authors of The Black Book of Communism, none of whom would find Gellately’s thesis extraordinary. However, since by the author’s account so many academics hasten to distinguish the “good” Lenin from the “bad” Lenin, the idea that the 20th-century bloodletting somehow begins with him may prove controversial. Gellately defends his position well, and indeed even loyal Leon Trotsky allowed that Lenin “was driven to distraction,” as Gellately puts it, “when other Bolsheviks did not grasp or agree that Communism could be realized only by paying a heavy price in human lives.” The dictatorship that Lenin and his ambitious acolyte Stalin forced upon Russia was open to Jewish revolutionaries, a point not lost on Hitler when he came to power; Gellately argues that Hitler’s war on the Soviet Union was “an extension of his war against the Jews,” summarized by Hitler’s conflation of “Jewish Bolshevism”; had Hitler kept his war confined to the Jews, Gellately observes in passing, many citizens of the Soviet regime would have proved sympathetic and even would have collaborated, but Hitler chose to make war on all things Soviet instead. Interestingly, Gellately notes toward the end of his book, Stalin’s postwar pogroms may have been a delayed reaction to Hitler’s charge; Stalin was no fan of Jewish Bolshevism either, but even so his “turn to anti-Semitism was out of character…and a complete contradiction of what Marxists had said about the Jewish question for almost a century.” Such things will prove revelations for many readers, but much of Gellately’s narrative repeats well-known facts about the various dictators’ rise and fall.
A more streamlined narrative would have been welcome. All the same, a solid contribution to the literature of World War II, totalitarianism and the bloody 20th century.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4005-6
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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