On this centennial of the Great War’s beginning, Wawro has composed a thoroughly researched and well-written account,...
A distinguished historian’s takedown of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s spectacularly inept leadership, which helped usher in the 20th century’s greatest tragedy.
One hundred years ago this June, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo. With its saber-rattling ally Germany discouraging any diplomatic solution to the crisis, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, triggering a series of treaty obligations that soon had the world at arms. Wawro (Military History/Univ. of North Texas, Dallas; Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East, 2010, etc.) sets the stage for this rash decision with opening chapters explaining the origins of the dual monarchy and the rot eating away at the empire well before any shot was fired. Under the doddering, now-mythologized Emperor Franz Josef, the empire was plagued by salacious court intrigues, corruption, linguistic controversies, and bureaucratic infighting and paralysis so widespread that in 1913, British newspapers were already predicting dissolution. Nevertheless, seemingly oblivious to its own infirmity, the government threw itself into a war it had no chance of winning. Wawro charts the disastrous 1914-1915 campaigns against Serbia and Russia that fatally exposed the empire’s weaknesses, where an army of unwilling soldiers, poorly led, inadequately trained and armed, was slaughtered by the millions. American readers with only a passing familiarity of the battles of World War I likely know it best from the perspective of the Western Front. Wawro offers a crucial insight into the Eastern Front, where the fecklessness of Germany’s most important ally drained attention and resources, almost guaranteeing the bloody standoff in the Western trenches and the eventual capitulation of the Kaiser’s army.
On this centennial of the Great War’s beginning, Wawro has composed a thoroughly researched and well-written account, mercilessly debunking any nostalgia for the old monarch and the deeply dysfunctional empire over which he presided.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-465-02835-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
HISTORY | MODERN | 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 Yorkerstaff 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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