The book doesn’t contain an underlying theme, and Atkins learns most of his history and science from books, but he has an...
A wide-ranging travelogue, covering eight deserts, interspersed with historical accounts of desert geography and travel.
Making up one-sixth of our planet’s land, deserts have fascinated writers since the dawn of Christianity, a group that includes Atkins (The Moor: A Journey into the English Wilderness, 2014), the former editorial director of Pan Macmillan UK. A lucid observer, the author chronicles his travels through the world’s most arid lands, ruminating on their history, natural history, ongoing conditions, and mostly discouraging future. Viewing the world through British eyes, he makes a beeline for the first of his eight deserts, the great Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia and Oman, a destination of the author’s most flamboyant countrymen, from T.E. Lawrence to Harry St. John Philby, whose paths he has tried to follow. Next up is Australia’s Great Victorian Desert, still partly off-limits as a result of 1950s British nuclear tests and home to a large Indigenous population ejected from their lands to accommodate the tests. No one was ejected from the Kyzylkum Desert in central Asia, but the population was impoverished as Soviet irrigation emptied the Aral Sea. American readers will enjoy the absence of depressing news from Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, and they will also find an account of the nostalgic wackiness of the Burning Man festival. In the Great Sonoran Desert to the southwest, thousands of migrants have died trying to reach the United States. Atkins describes activists who set out water and provisions deep in the desert and the vigilantes and Border Patrol agents who destroy them. Each section begins with a detailed map to help situate readers in the region.
The book doesn’t contain an underlying theme, and Atkins learns most of his history and science from books, but he has an acute eye and delivers unrelated but satisfying journalistic accounts of the world’s hottest, driest regions.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-53988-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
A well-written, well-argued story of the Civil War in the West. McDonough (History/Auburn Univ.; The Limits of Glory, 1991) continues to explore underexamined aspects of the Civil War, this time the western theater, often thought of as a sidelight to the real scrap in the East. In McDonough's view, the western engagements were crucial in sealing the fate of the Confederacy. He sets the stage for his account of the Kentucky battles by outlining the Confederacy's perilous state in the spring of 1862. The fall in February of the Tennessee river forts Henry and Donelson effectively split the South geographically and led to the abandonment a week later of Nashville, the first Southern capital to capitulate. On April 6, federal and Confederate armies clashed at Shiloh Church with horrific loss of life. Claimed as a victory by the Southern commanding general, the battle failed to halt the federal advance and led to the removal of P.G.T. Beauregard, the hero of Fort Sumter and Bull Run, as commander of Confederate forces in the West. He was replaced by the scruffy Braxton Bragg, whose record at Shiloh was itself ambiguous. On April 7, the Union Navy captured Island No. 10 on the Mississippi, which paved the way for the fall 17 days later of New Orleans. The South still had an opportunity to snatch victory at a clash in central Kentucky at a small town called Perryville, where in October 22,000 federals fought 17,000 Confederates. Forced to retreat, Bragg had to give up his dream of retaking Kentucky. The war would drag on for 30 more months, but McDonough shows that Southern defeat was increasingly inevitable. As studies of the Civil War become more narrow in focus, it's refreshing to find a volume that has some sweep to it, using the war in and around Kentucky to encapsulate the entire conflict in the West.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-87049-847-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
A journey through middle Europe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, of which George Orwell would have been proud, if he had extended his own travels from the Road to Wigan Pier to Minsk. This is not a land flowing with milk and honey. The region and its peoples have been fought over, uprooted, persecuted, and killed for a thousand years. Just in this century, the Borderlands have survived the collapse of three empires, the division of the spoils after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, the Second World War, the Holocaust, Stalin's despotism, and the fall of the Soviet Union. As Applebaum, foreign editor for the London Spectator, aptly comments, ``To sift through the layers, one needs to practice a kind of visual and aural archeology.'' She does so with sensitive skill, noting how the cobblestones have disappeared beneath cracked concrete, how medieval foundations have vanished behind ``spectacular monotony,'' and how churches and shops have given way to numbered apartment blocks. She records the rival nationalisms- -Lithuanians hating Poles, Poles hating Lithuanians, everyone hating the Russians. She sees the miles of rusting Soviet naval ships in Kaliningrad, the pit behind the courthouse in Woroniaki in the Ukraine where the KGB dumped the bodies of those they had executed, and records the changes that have taken place as a Ukrainian professor of atheism renames himself professor of religion but delivers the same lectures. She ends her visit in Odessa, with its elegant houses, the only upbeat part of the trip. Otherwise, one is inclined to agree with the Russian who observes sourly that there is no difference between a peasant on the Volga and a man living in the African jungle except that the African has sunlight, fresh air, clean water, and no ice in the winter. The decor may be Soviet drab and mildew, but the book is intelligent, evocative, filled with vivid characterization and an understanding of the history of the area.
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42150-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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