With a wealth of research material, Lloyd reveals a different side to the war that would shape the 20th century.
A respected military historian examines the unknown battlegrounds of a crucial conflict.
Even after a century, the bloody, mud-soaked images of World War I are deeply ingrained in the public consciousness. However, that is only one part of a larger picture, according to veteran WWI historian Lloyd, author of The Amritsar Massacre, Hundred Days, and Passchendaele. In Eastern Europe, there was a very different war. This book is the second part of a planned trilogy, following The Western Front (2021). Like the previous installment, the author delves deeply into records and correspondence of the time. Though the outbreak of war was triggered by a political assassination, there were deep-seated tensions and ambitions on all sides that had been simmering for years. When Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia, Russia took the opportunity to launch an offensive, and Germany counterattacked. Russia had huge numbers, but Austria-Hungary knew the territory, and Germany had the advantages of aerial reconnaissance and a reliable transport system. This was a war of maneuver and logistics fought across a broad front, with civilians caught in the middle. Lloyd capably lays out the strategies of each side, examining why certain battles were won or lost. A key point was the constant drain of Germany’s men and resources, which fatally weakened its army in the West. The final count in the East, according to Lloyd, was 16 million soldiers dead and 2 million wounded. Furthermore, the Austrian-Hungarian and Russian empires collapsed, presaging at least a decade of instability. This is an unquestionably compelling story, but Lloyd sometimes becomes bogged in the complexity and details of the narrative. Aficionados of military history will enjoy the book, but general readers may find it heavy going.
With a wealth of research material, Lloyd reveals a different side to the war that would shape the 20th century.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781324092711
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
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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