Popular World War II history, perhaps more popular than necessary.
Another history of the liberation of Paris.
Paris was taken by the Wehrmacht in 1940 and then taken back in 1944. Military historians have covered this ground in countless books, and this one is a middling entry in the genre. Best known as the co-author of the bestselling Killing series with Bill O’Reilly, journalist Dugard—who has also authored books on Christopher Columbus, Capt. James Cook, and others—delivers another breathless historical narrative that will find a receptive audience among fans of Dugard and the O’Reilly series. Despite the book’s title, there was no epic battle for Paris. In 1940, the French declared it an open city, so the Wehrmacht moved in without a fight and withdrew, four years later, without defending it. Dugard opens with the German invasion on May 10, 1940, which ended in the French surrender. Then he delivers a vivid yet scattershot history of the war in Europe (the Russian front receives a rare mention), with a heavy emphasis on France and ending with 20 pages recounting the liberation of Paris on Aug. 25, 1944. Appropriately, the author gives Charles de Gaulle a major role and devotes several chapters to the little-known Battle of Bir Hakeim, the valiant defense of a North African desert outpost by Free French troops in 1942. Writing for a broad audience, Dugard inevitably devotes far too much space to the French Resistance, the heroics of suffering of which were not matched by their contributions to victory. As a more “in-depth” work, Dugard recommends the modestly deep 1965 bestseller Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. Far better are Lloyd Clark’s Blitzkrieg (2016), which focuses on the 1940 French defeat, and Jean Edward Smith’s The Liberation of Paris (2019), an instructive look at the political calculations of the Allies.
Popular World War II history, perhaps more popular than necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18308-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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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