A tough slog for anyone without a technical interest in the workings of an army.
Sturdy but plodding account of the hell of World War I.
France-based military historian Ford turns in a comprehensive survey of the Great War as it was fought over territory belonging to a rapidly crumbling Ottoman Empire, including Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and what is now Saudi Arabia. With its battle-by-battle, unit-by-unit narrative, the book seems intended for an audience of professional historians rather than history buffs, and the writing is excessively dry. Ford’s attention is often focused on matters of order of battle rather than of the battle itself—e.g., “In front of Bitlis Nazarbekov had the 7th and 8th Caucasian Rifles in prepared positions, supported by field artillery and howitzers, with a battalion of the 6th Caucasian Rifles in reserve.” Still, the author provides solid, detailed accounts of incidents such as the disastrous British expedition into Mesopotamia and the even more disastrous landing at Gallipoli. He takes a cold eye to the claims to greatness of T.E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia, that is—whose effectiveness in the field was amplified by a helpful public-relations machine, and who seems a touch petulant whenever he is encountered, certainly less even-keeled than his commander, Gen. Edmund Allenby. Even here, however, Ford is given less to personalities than aggregates: “Two days later Allenby made significant changes to his table of organisation. The cavalry would now become the Desert Mounted Corps, while the infantry was reorganized into XX Corps and XXI Corps.”
A tough slog for anyone without a technical interest in the workings of an army.Pub Date: May 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60598-091-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Borderland/Ivan Dee
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
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
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
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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