A deeply researched study of an early clash of civilizations, when England attempted to impose its will on East Asia.
The Opium War of 1839 began, in at least one sense, a half-century earlier, when a British adventurer attracted enough attention after wandering around in the country to give the imperial Chinese government a solid case that it didn’t want outsiders to enter the realm. After a period of imprisonment, writes Platt (Chinese History/Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst; Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War, 2012, etc.), the traveler returned to England, where he taught an American named Benjamin Franklin how to make tofu. After that comparatively pleasant interlude, things took a martial turn; Britain and France sent competing fleets, and Asia beckoned to every European imperial power. China tried to fend them off, with the governor general of Macao, for instance, closing off access to food and water to foreign fleets. While the emperor accepted gifts from the king of England, he did not welcome commerce: “If the king would just tend to the boundaries of his own empire…and feel ‘dutiful submission’ within his own heart, there would be no need for a British mission ever to come to China again.” The British did come, demanding that China open its markets for the sale of illegal opium. As the author notes, it’s not as if there was no demand for the product—Chinese students used it to stay sharp for their exams, and “for those in more humble situations who couldn’t afford to smoke it themselves, employment in the opium trade still provided a chance for income as couriers and petty dealers.” British victory opened the door to concessions to other European powers and, in time, brought down the Qing monarchy, which ushered in the modern, communist China—surely a lesson in unintended consequences.
A fluent, well-written exercise in revisionism, one of interest to students of modern geopolitics as well as 19th-century history.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-307-96173-0
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | MILITARY | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
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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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. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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