Useful reading for anyone with an interest in the first years of the post–Cold War era.
Revisionist study of George H.W. Bush’s term in the White House, which saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the U.S. as the world’s sole superpower.
According to Engel (Director, Center for Presidential History/Southern Methodist Univ.; Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy, 2007, etc.), the first George Bush skillfully negotiated a course around numerous treacherous shoals. One involved Mikhail Gorbachev, whom other leaders regarded in friendlier terms than did Bush. Early in his term, Bush shook off advice from Margaret Thatcher and his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, and looked to “prepare in a serious way for a post-Gorbachev future,” which in effect meant giving support to Gorbachev’s competitor, Boris Yeltsin. Bush’s attention to a collapsing Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War also meant careful negotiation with China, whose leadership, Engel argues, was terrified of the reforms sweeping other formerly communist regimes. The author praises Bush for his deft handling of numerous fraught situations, from the invasion of Panama to the much more extensive invasion of Kuwait. In this, however, he is not uncritical, and he notes that Bush was fortunate in facing modest resistance in the latter theater, even as he prepared for an extended conflict and significant casualties, writing in his diary, sanguinely, “sometimes in life you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.” Engel goes so far as to venture that Bush’s views of Saddam Hussein “obscured his ability to tell fact from fiction when it came to the Iraqi leader.” Even so, the author gives Bush credit for leaving office with a strong state and a global presence enhanced by the world’s most dominant military, and he observes pointedly that the White House is not the best arena for the inexperienced; one thinks of the current president when reading Engel’s caution that “the steeper the learning curve…the greater the danger.”
Useful reading for anyone with an interest in the first years of the post–Cold War era.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-547-42306-7
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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