An excellent starting point for anyone who wants to understand modern Asian history.
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
HISTORY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.
A popular novelist turns his hand to historical writing, focusing on what shipwrecks can tell us.
There’s something inherently romantic about shipwrecks: the mystery, the drama of disaster, the prospect of lost treasure. Gibbins, who’s found acclaim as an author of historical fiction, has long been fascinated with them, and his expertise in both archaeology and diving provides a tone of solid authority to his latest book. The author has personally dived on more than half the wrecks discussed in the book; for the other cases, he draws on historical records and accounts. “Wrecks offer special access to history at all…levels,” he writes. “Unlike many archaeological sites, a wreck represents a single event in which most of the objects were in use at that time and can often be closely dated. What might seem hazy in other evidence can be sharply defined, pointing the way to fresh insights.” Gibbins covers a wide variety of cases, including wrecks dating from classical times; a ship torpedoed during World War II; a Viking longship; a ship of Arab origin that foundered in Indonesian waters in the ninth century; the Mary Rose, the flagship of the navy of Henry VIII; and an Arctic exploring vessel, the Terror (for more on that ship, read Paul Watson’s Ice Ghost). Underwater excavation often produces valuable artifacts, but Gibbins is equally interested in the material that reveals the society of the time. He does an excellent job of placing each wreck within a broader context, as well as examining the human elements of the story. The result is a book that will appeal to readers with an interest in maritime history and who would enjoy a different, and enlightening, perspective.
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781250325372
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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