Novelist and historian Groom (El Paso, 2016, etc.) recounts the origins and fortunes of the grand alliance forged to battle the Axis powers in World War II.
In the early 1930s, it would have seemed unlikely for the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States to agree on anything. As the author observes, when incoming President Franklin Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union as a legitimate government, he did so “against the wishes of a large part of the country, including his own mother.” Winston Churchill was implacably opposed to any such recognition and held Josef Stalin in scorn, detesting everything about Bolshevism—yet still came together with Roosevelt to join forces with Stalin against Hitler in the west, eventually opening a two-front war. Getting to that point required plenty of maneuvering, and the powers developed considerable skills in hiding things from one another as each jockeyed for position to be first among equals. Groom’s account of how Churchill, he of “devious mind,” convinced Roosevelt to sign on to the invasion of North Africa is excellent. For all that, there’s not much new in this history, and certainly nothing that readers well-versed in WWII history won’t know. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the audience here, for Groom writes as if his readers had never heard of Churchill, or FDR, or Uncle Joe. That notwithstanding, his accounts of the Tehran Conference of 1943 and the later Yalta Conference are tasty pieces of drama in which Stalin played a too-believing Roosevelt while planning a postwar Soviet empire, or at least a system of satellite states. At the latter gathering, he notes, “Roosevelt made the stunning declaration that he did not intend for American troops to remain in Europe more than two years after the war, and Stalin, apparently emboldened by the news, lied or prevaricated about his intentions in Eastern Europe.”
Not Groom at his best but certainly serviceable for readers without much background in the history of the era.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4262-1966-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | MILITARY | HISTORY | MODERN
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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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