A fine account of a distant era that still echoes today.
Jones returns with another sweeping history of the medieval world.
Having penned books about specific elements of his specialty (Crusaders, Magna Carta, The Templars), the author chronicles the 1,000-year story of the Middle Ages. His latest is a doorstop but never less than absorbing. In traditional histories, the Middle Ages extend from the fifth century to the 14th century. Jones extends it to the 1527 sack of Rome; he makes a solid case that the end did not occur until the Protestant Reformation shattered the Catholic Church. In the first 70 pages, the author describes the Roman Empire’s painful decline and abdication of the last Western emperor, whose successor referred to himself as the king of Italy but declared a symbolic obeisance to another Roman emperor, this one in Constantinople. Jones reminds readers that this “Eastern” emperor ruled the Balkans, today’s Turkey, and the Middle East and attempted, with temporary success, to win back lands in Western Europe and North Africa lost to “barbarians.” This Byzantine Empire considered itself Roman and, although vastly shrunken by Islamic conquests in the seventh century, remained in power for a millennium until the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453. The author delivers long essays on the early years of European nationhood, the rise of monasteries, knighthood, feudalism, and the Crusades. Less familiar is the catastrophic 13th-century Mongol invasion of Europe, followed by a commercial revolution, the rise of a merchant class, trade, scholarship, transoceanic exploration, and technology such as printing, which ultimately weakened the power of the Catholic Church by encouraging the rise of secular society. Despite a nod to contemporary interpretation (climate change and slavery receive much attention), this is traditional great-men-and-events history, but Jones writes a lively narrative, freely expressing doubts when it’s not clear what actually happened.
A fine account of a distant era that still echoes today.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984880-87-1
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.
A story of ordinary people, both victims and survivors, thrown into extraordinary history.
Pellegrino says his book is “simply the story of what happened to people and objects under the atomic bombs, and it is dedicated to the hope that no one will ever witness this, or die this way, again.” Images of Aug. 6, 1945, as reported by survivors, include the sight of a cart falling from the sky with the hindquarters of the horse pulling it still attached; a young boy who put his hands over his eyes as the bomb hit—and “saw the bones of his fingers shining through shut eyelids, just like an X-ray photograph”; “statue people” flash-fossilized and fixed in place, covered in a light snowfall of ashes; and, of course, the ghosts—people severely flash-burned on one side of their bodies, leaving shadows on a wall, the side of a building, or whatever stood nearby. The carnage continued for days, weeks, and years as victims of burns and those who developed various forms of cancer succumbed to their injuries: “People would continue to die in ways that people never imagined people could die.” Scattered in these survivor stories is another set of stories from those involved in the development and deployment of the only two atomic weapons ever used in warfare. The author also tells of the letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard to Franklin D. Roosevelt that started the ball rolling toward the formation of the Manhattan Project and the crew conversations on the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, the planes that dropped the Little Boy on Hiroshima and the Fat Man on Nagasaki. We have to find a way to get along, one crew member said, “because we now have the wherewithal to destroy everything.”
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798228309890
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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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