The style is traditional, even stodgy, while the discoveries may be revolutionary in World War I historiography.
A doctoral candidate and senior paralegal debuts with a sharp look at the so-called “Christmas truce” of 1914, discovering that distortion has colored many accounts of it—and of World War I itself.
In a text adapted from her master’s thesis, Crocker displays some things clearly. First, she did an enormous amount of work for that degree, reading countless books, newspaper accounts, diaries, and letters of those involved (almost entirely those of the English military) and watching films (documentary and otherwise) that involve the celebrated truce. Second, she did sufficiently transform the organization and tone from a graduate school exercise. She retains the well-used format of introduction-body-conclusion; she provides far more examples for each of her points than is necessary; she repeats and summarizes too much; her attitude remains generally detached and scholarly. Still, Crocker has created a work perhaps powerful enough to alter the conventional narrative of the incident. She destroys a number of misconceptions. Discovering considerable newspaper coverage from late 1914 and even into 1915, she demonstrates with great clarity that the soldiers involved were generally not dissuaded from socializing with the enemy by their commanding officers (and there were no punishments in the aftermath), proving with ample evidence that the combatants involved (on the English side) were not using the informal truces up and down the trenches to engage in some sort of anti-war protest. The author also expands her scope to show that the current dominant story of World War I—that incompetent commanders sent waves of young men to the slaughterhouse and that the entire war was not only ill-fought, but was a principal cause of World War II—is based more on tradition and myth than on fact. A storm of debate will no doubt ensue.
The style is traditional, even stodgy, while the discoveries may be revolutionary in World War I historiography.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8131-6615-5
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
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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