Entertaining WWII minutia.
The seemingly unrelated stories of three World War II–era figures who “embellish[ed] their biographies with exotic tales of adventure.”
Buruma’s subjects didn’t know each other, had little influence on history, looked after their own interests in occupied nations, and lied about it afterward. The author, who has written numerous books about this era, notes that “none of the three was utterly depraved. They were all too human, especially in their frailties. Similar frailties can be seen in many figures strutting around the public sphere today.” Having spent perhaps too much effort justifying the significance of his subjects, he proceeds to write an enjoyable book that will appeal to WWII buffs. Felix Kersten (1898-1962) spent World War I in the German army, ending the war in Finland, where he studied physical therapy before moving to Berlin. A charismatic figure, he grew wealthy as a practitioner of healing massage, serving many highly placed figures, including Heinrich Himmler. Safely ensconced in Sweden after the war, he proclaimed (and a gullible biographer agreed) that he had used his influence to save anti-Nazis and Jews. Buruma expresses understandable skepticism. In Holland, which was decimated by the Nazis, Friedrich Weinreb (1910-1988) survived by convincing them that he could find Jews in hiding while also collecting money from Jews with the false promise of keeping them from deportation. He served three years in prison, but, an aggressive self-promoter, he later convinced many that he was a hero of the resistance scapegoated by the establishment. Perhaps the most bizarre of the trio was Kawashima Yoshiko (c. 1906-1948), daughter of a Chinese aristocrat who gave her up for adoption to a Japanese official. Raised and educated in Japan, she was a flamboyant figure who dressed in men’s clothes and whose aggressive support of that nation’s conquests in Manchuria and China made her a popular figure in Japanese media during the 1930s. She sat out the years after Pearl Harbor in Beijing, after which a vengeful Chinese government executed her for treason.
Entertaining WWII minutia.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780593296646
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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