For WWII neophytes.
The author of Taking Paris returns with a look at how World War II progressed in Europe after the D-Day landings.
Unquestionably, the fight for the Nazi capital was an epic confrontation and a crucial element of the ending of the war. Yet popular historian Dugard, co-author of Bill O’Reilly’s Killing series, examines that part of the story only glancingly, offering a brief, desultory section near the end. Instead, the author focuses on the Allied push across Western Europe, starting with D-Day and including the disastrous Operation Market Garden and the Ardennes Offensive. All of these events, significant as they are, have been covered better before, whether as official history, memoir, or analytical commentary. Dugard reiterates the antagonism between Montgomery and Patton, a conflict that ran so deep it almost derailed the entire Allied effort. But this is also well-traveled territory. Dugard seeks to inject new material via colorful figures like journalist Martha Gellhorn, but her wartime adventures have already been recounted extensively—not least by her. The author also notes that there was an Allied plan to beat the Russians to Berlin with an airborne troop drop, although it never came to fruition. This is hardly a secret: There is a reference to it in Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers, among other works. One waits for Dugard to spring a surprise, in the form of new documents or a fresh perspective, but it never comes. He barely mentions the Russian army that actually took Berlin, and the eventual move by American and British forces into the western part of the city, the real start of the Cold War, receives no coverage. The postwar fate of Berlin was settled largely at the Yalta Conference, not by Patton or Montgomery. Anyone interested in more rigorous histories of this period have plenty of other options, including those of Antony Beevor, Peter Caddick-Adams, and Rick Atkinson.
For WWII neophytes.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18742-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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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