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
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.
The National Book Award winner delivers a handbook for an age in which egomania is morphing into autocracy at warp speed.
New Yorker contributor Gessen, an immigrant from what was then the Soviet Union, understands totalitarian systems, especially the ways in which, under totalitarian rule, language is degraded into meaninglessness. Today, writes the author, we are “using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe.” Against that, Gessen suggests, we now have an administration for which words hold no reality, advancing the idea that “alternative facts” are fine but professing dismay when one calls them lies. The step-by-step degradation of democratic institutions that follows is a modern-day rejoinder to the fact that more than half a dozen years separated the Reichstag fire from World War II. That’s a big buffer of time in which to admit all manner of corruption, and all manner of corruption is what we’ve been seeing: Gessen reminds us about Mick Mulvaney’s accepting handsome gifts from the payday-loan industry he was supposed to regulate and Ben Carson’s attempt to stock his office with a $31,000 dining-room set. Yet corruption’s not the right word, writes the author, since Trump and company are quite open and even boastful about what used to be a matter of shame and duplicity. The real tragedy, it seems, is that they have been so successful in creating what the author calls a “new, smaller American society,” one that willfully excludes the Other. Many writers have chronicled the Trump administration’s missteps and crimes, but few as concisely as Gessen, and her book belongs on the shelf alongside Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and Amy Siskind’s The List as a record of how far we have fallen.
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18893-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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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