Discouraging yet important, expertly rendered political history.
Historical analysis of the interwar period and “the legacy of anti-globalism,” a history that holds relevance for today.
MacArthur fellow Zahra, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, begins by quoting 1920s pundits who mourned the golden age before 1914 when internationalism flourished and one traveled the world after simply buying a ticket. This may have been true for the (largely White) affluent class, but deep poverty and inequality affected the majority. The devastation of World War I produced worldwide demands for justice. Unfortunately, true justice was hard to come by, and readers will often squirm at Zahra’s excellent yet unnerving history of an era when nationalism—always more powerful than ideology, economics, or brotherly love—exploded. Those who assume that mass murder began with Hitler will learn their error as Zahra recounts how the torrent of new European states created after the Treaty of Versailles proclaimed the superiority of the ruling ethnic group and expelled “foreigners.” By 1926, this situation had created 9.5 million of “a new kind of migrant: the refugee.” Though many historians don’t portray Hitler and Mussolini as anti-globalists, they justified their wars as a means of acquiring resources from a world that they thought was depriving their citizens. Autarky, or national self-sufficiency, became a worldwide passion. Passports appeared; tariffs soared; and governments promoted cottage industries to replace foreign imports and a return to the land to allow the unemployed to feed themselves and the nation. Zahra points out that these sentiments slowed during World War II and the Cold War. Globalism became a buzzword in the 1990s, when “a certain kind of free-market capitalism and global integration appeared to be the unstoppable victors of history” after the collapse of communism. McDonald’s had opened in Moscow, and the new World Wide Web was uniting the world. Then came the 21st century, when the bottom seemed to fall out, and supernationalists proclaimed that they had been right all along.
Discouraging yet important, expertly rendered political history.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-393-65196-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A well-documented and enlightened portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt for our times.
A comprehensive exploration of one of the most influential women of the last century.
The accomplishments of Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) were widespread and substantial, and her trailblazing actions in support of social justice and global peace resonate powerfully in our current moment. Her remarkable life has been extensively documented in a host of acclaimed biographies, including Blanche Wiesen Cook’s excellent three-volume life. Eleanor was also a highly prolific writer in her own right; through memoirs, essays, and letters, she continuously documented experiences and advancing ideas. In the most expansive one-volume portrait to date, Michaelis offers a fresh perspective on some well-worn territory—e.g., Eleanor’s unconventional marriage to Franklin and her progressively charged relationships with men and women, including her intimacy with newspaper reporter Lorena Hickok. The author paints a compelling portrait of Eleanor’s life as an evolving journey of transformation, lingering on the significant episodes to shed nuance on her circumstances and the players involved. Eleanor’s privileged yet dysfunctional childhood was marked by the erratic behavior and early deaths of her flighty, alcoholic father and socially absorbed mother, and she was left to shuttle among equally neglectful relatives. During her young adulthood, her instinctual need to be useful and do good work attracted the attention of notable mentors, each serving to boost her confidence and fine-tune her political and social convictions, shaping her expanding consciousness. As in his acclaimed biography of Charles Schulz, Michaelis displays his nimble storytelling skills, smoothly tracking Eleanor’s ascension from wife and mother to her powerfully influential and controversial role as first lady and continued leadership and activist efforts beyond. Throughout, the author lucidly illuminates the essence of her thinking and objectives. “As Eleanor’s activism evolved,” writes Michaelis, “she did not see herself reaching to solve social problems so much as engaging with individuals to unravel discontinuities between the old order and modernity.”
A well-documented and enlightened portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt for our times.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9201-6
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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