How a decade of violence in Asia laid the foundation for eventual stability.
In this meticulously researched and carefully rendered study of the region in the period between 1945 and 1955, military historian Spector examines the conflicts that engulfed nearly every country, resulting in untold deaths and misery. Before World War II, the European colonial powers had enforced stability, overturning old empires and drawing new maps. This system was upended by a period of Japanese domination, the end of which created a power vacuum, with many players rushing to fill it. The French and the Dutch tried to reassert themselves, but the colonial game was up. The British looked for an honorable way to withdraw while retaining an economic role, but their power was waning. In many nations, struggles against colonial rules morphed into civil wars: “Regional, religious, ethnic, and ideological differences turned out to be, in many cases, as potent as the desire for social justice and national emancipation or the struggle against racism and colonial exploitation.” Spector is wary of the view that the violence was a matter of Cold War proxies. “It might be more accurate,” he writes, “to say that the Cold War did not spread to Asia; it was invited in.” In fact, it is impossible to find a single definitive model, as the conflict ranged from the open warfare of Korea to the insurgency of the Malayan Emergency. China was in a class of its own for complexity and clashes. Gradually, the politics of the region stabilized, sometimes through compromises and sometimes through military victories. There would be more violence in the following decades—most notably, the Vietnam War—but by 1955, the political framework was largely established. Spector does an admirable job exploring the tumultuous events of his large canvas, and he is willing to look past the headlines for the underlying reasons, motivations, and dynamics of each conflict.
An excellent starting point for anyone who wants to understand modern Asian history.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-25465-5
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
Categories: HISTORY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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