Provocative exploration of overlooked causes of a war that may or may not have been a historical inevitability.
An examination of the many approaches historians have taken to understanding the origins of the First World War.
As British historian Anderson notes, thousands on thousands of books have been devoted to World War I. Yet only a small number concern the history of history—historiography, that is. Anderson considers six major historians whose work even well-read students of the Great War may not know. While many historians have viewed the war as inevitable, others as the result of a chain of errors, Anderson’s sextet took a far more nuanced view and delivered far more intriguing interpretations of events. Some suggested, for instance, a causal chain that traces the war to England’s arrangement with Russia that the czar could do much as he pleased in Central Asia as long as Russia left British India, the keystone of its empire, alone. In the view of conservative American historian Paul Schroeder, the war was at least in part due to the major European powers’ undisguised desire to bring down the Habsburg Empire: “No actor in the system gave any thought to what the consequences of the deletion of Austro-Hungary from it were likely to be,” Anderson writes. “Sensing this, Austro-Hungary rebelled against the system, only to bring itself down with the system.” And it took plenty of lives down with it: Italian journalist and historian Luigi Albertini examined the reluctance of Italy, initially an ally of Germany and Austro-Hungary, to join in the war, only to do so 10 months after the outbreak in order to take part in the spoils; the result, thanks to the blusteringly inept chief of staff Luigi Cadorna, was the slaughter of the Italian army at Caporetto, “the most ignominious single defeat of any belligerent in the First World War.”
Provocative exploration of overlooked causes of a war that may or may not have been a historical inevitability.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9781804297674
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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 Yorker staff 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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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