A lifetime of scholarship informs this highly readable analysis of what the author calls “the forgotten conflict.”
A scholar who has written often about 20th-century warfare (In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, 2005, etc.) returns with a comprehensive account of the many effects of World War I.
Reynolds’ (International History/Cambridge Univ.) theses are more intriguing than complicated. Although he reminds us continually of the dire human costs of the Great War—tens of thousands of soldiers died in the initial hour at the Battle of the Somme—his focus remains on how the war affected the principal combatants, especially his native England. England, he argues, entered the war not due to any threat of invasion or attack but for what he characterizes as moral reasons. He also reminds us that the United States entered the war very late (the spring of 1917) and did so not out of fear of attack (though some did occur on the seas) but also for moral reasons. Reynolds shows how the great prewar empires imploded during and after the war; the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, for example, and the consequent redrawing of maps in the Middle East have had enduring effects to the present moment. Reynolds also looks at the arts during and after the war—poetry (especially those wonderful British poets like Sassoon and Owen), fiction and film. Similarly, he examines how the various combatants honored their warriors, fallen and otherwise, and shows how countries dealt with the recent deaths of the war’s final veterans. He charts, as well, the involvement of Australia; shows how the war affected relations between England and Ireland (and Northern Ireland); and examines how the war affected the writing of history in various countries. We also see how the term “Great War” became “World War I.”
A lifetime of scholarship informs this highly readable analysis of what the author calls “the forgotten conflict.”Pub Date: May 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-08863-2
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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