Fans of the companion volumes to Ken Burns’ film series will find this a familiar, and worthy, approach.
An image-driven history of the tumultuous period between and including the world wars.
Jones, an accomplished popular historian of the medieval era, turns to the recent past in this collaboration with Brazilian artist Amaral, who—following the lead of film director Peter Jackson and the World War I footage he restored in They Shall Not Grow Old—colorizes images from the years 1914 to 1945. That colorization, which Jones calls “an emotional enhancing agent,” serves to underscore just how recent this past is: When we look into the unblinking eyes of a dead German machine-gunner from 100 years ago, we could be looking at a neighbor. Jones rejects the idea of considering the period a “second Thirty Years War” even though many historians have traced the causes of both wars to antecedent events much like those of the past, including failed efforts at peace and imperial rivalries, marked here by an affecting portrait of the Archduke Ferdinand and Archduchess Sophie lying in state side by side after having been assassinated in Sarajevo. The text amounts to mostly a series of extended captions, but Jones capably limns some of the big-picture elements, including the Russian defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg, which helped precipitate the Russian Revolution and the rise of Hindenburg to power in Germany; and the Battle of the Marne, which halted a German offensive and caused the invaders to dig themselves into trench fortifications: “Little did they know what a trend they were setting.” Many of the photos are unsettling, even horrific, such as an image of a Japanese soldier’s skull that emblazoned the February 1943 issue of Life. Others, such as that of Brazilian singer and actor Carmen Miranda dancing on a Hollywood street on VJ-Day, are little known.
Fans of the companion volumes to Ken Burns’ film series will find this a familiar, and worthy, approach. (200 color photos)Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-222-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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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