Fans of the companion volumes to Ken Burns’ film series will find this a familiar, and worthy, approach.
An image-driven history of the tumultuous period between and including the world wars.
Jones, an accomplished popular historian of the medieval era, turns to the recent past in this collaboration with Brazilian artist Amaral, who—following the lead of film director Peter Jackson and the World War I footage he restored in They Shall Not Grow Old—colorizes images from the years 1914 to 1945. That colorization, which Jones calls “an emotional enhancing agent,” serves to underscore just how recent this past is: When we look into the unblinking eyes of a dead German machine-gunner from 100 years ago, we could be looking at a neighbor. Jones rejects the idea of considering the period a “second Thirty Years War” even though many historians have traced the causes of both wars to antecedent events much like those of the past, including failed efforts at peace and imperial rivalries, marked here by an affecting portrait of the Archduke Ferdinand and Archduchess Sophie lying in state side by side after having been assassinated in Sarajevo. The text amounts to mostly a series of extended captions, but Jones capably limns some of the big-picture elements, including the Russian defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg, which helped precipitate the Russian Revolution and the rise of Hindenburg to power in Germany; and the Battle of the Marne, which halted a German offensive and caused the invaders to dig themselves into trench fortifications: “Little did they know what a trend they were setting.” Many of the photos are unsettling, even horrific, such as an image of a Japanese soldier’s skull that emblazoned the February 1943 issue of Life. Others, such as that of Brazilian singer and actor Carmen Miranda dancing on a Hollywood street on VJ-Day, are little known.
Fans of the companion volumes to Ken Burns’ film series will find this a familiar, and worthy, approach. (200 color photos)Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-222-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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