A very worthy addition to the historical literature, complementing Hew Strachan’s The First World War (2004), Robert...
A searching study of the war to end all wars.
World War I was inevitable, given the complex rivalries that existed among England, France, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the other players in the struggle. But, writes Neiberg (History/US Air Force Academy), it was not inevitable just because an unfortunate Austro-Hungarian nobleman was assassinated: “The archduke’s political views were unpopular in the Viennese court, and the royals of Europe had often snubbed Franz Ferdinand because he had married a woman of inferior social status.” It took months after the assassination for the Allied and Central Powers to decide that the time was right for bloodletting. Many another poor assumption and bad decision followed. The Germans discounted the British army, even though it was probably the best-trained and most effective in Europe at the time; the German army, further, settled on a policy of Schrecklichkeit, or “frightfulness,” in Belgium, “a policy that had been approved by leaders of both the army and the government” but that succeeded largely in uniting the Allied citizenry against the savage Hun; the Russians relied on cavalry against machine guns, the French on forts against heavy artillery, the British on incompetent leaders, and so on, all at terrible cost. The rate of butchery was established early on, as Neiberg shows: in the first few weeks of the war, the French army lost 200,000 men and a full tenth of its officer corps “in an attempt to recover Alsace and Lorraine, only to discover that the real threat lay elsewhere.” And things were no better on the fringes of the war, in places like Bulgaria and Cameroon, where the fighting looked only a little more modern than the wars of the 18th century. Even the peace was confused, with “Bolshevism, authoritarianism, the beginnings of fascism, and fragile democracies” in the place of the old empires and dynasties.
A very worthy addition to the historical literature, complementing Hew Strachan’s The First World War (2004), Robert Massie’s Castles of Steel (2003), and other recent studies of the war.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-674-01696-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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