Roundup: Books

Paul Kubricht: Review of Igor Lukes's "On the Edge of the Cold War: American Diplomats and Spies in Postwar Prague"

Paul Kubricht is Professor of History & Political Science at LeTourneau University. For many years, Western historians have neglected the events surrounding the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948. In most cold war histories, February 1948 might rate a paragraph or two. In addition, historians have not systematically evaluated in depth the personalities and decisions behind American policy related to this takeover. Igor Lukes’s study helps to fill this gap by focusing on U.S. policy regarding the events taking shape in Czechoslovakia, and also brings additional perspective and insight into domestic Czechoslovak politics as democratic and Communist forces vied for influence and power. 

Dan McMillan: Review of Stephen G. Fritz's " Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East"

Dan McMillan is an independent scholar.In his thoughtful and beautifully written history of Nazi Germany’s war against the Soviet Union, Stephen G. Fritz has two ambitious and important objectives. Fritz aims in the first place to provide a narrative that, while still structured by the unfolding of military operations, seamlessly integrates military events with the ideological convictions, economic imperatives, and social conditions that did so much to shape the course of the war. Fritz also seeks to illuminate the ways in which the war in the East (the Ostkrieg of the book’s title) radicalized Nazi policy toward the Jews, producing the Holocaust and shaping the pace and manner by which it developed. Aimed chiefly at upper-division undergraduates and lay readers interested in military history and the Holocaust, this book will also be helpful to historians of genocide who want to improve their understanding of the larger context in which the Holocaust was embedded. 

Review of Mary L. Dudziak's "War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences"

Robert Kodosky is assistant professor of history at West Chester University.“A time for war, a time for peace?”--at least that is what Pete Seeger’s song “Turn! Turn! Turn! (to Everything There is a Season)” says.  The old Seeger tune that the Birds later made famous cites biblical verse to suggest that clocks are naturally wound in turn by war and by peace. One marks time and then yields to the other, calibrating the human condition, from one season to the next. “Turn! Turn! Turn!” topped America’s music charts in 1965. It resonated with listeners who, after two decades of the Cold War keeping time, awaited passage into a new era measured by peace. That time failed to arrive. Wartime, whether set in Vietnam, El Salvador, Bosnia, Iraq, or elsewhere, continued to move the hands of America’s clock. Wartime, for Americans, came to constitute virtually all time.

Felix Salmon: Review of William L. Silber's "Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence"

Felix Salmon is the finance blogger for Reuters.The global financial crisis destroyed reputations as effectively as it destroyed wealth. Alan Greenspan, Robert E. Rubin, Sanford I. Weill, Richard S. Fuld Jr., James E. Cayne — the list of the humbled is almost endless, while the number of heroes is minuscule. One man, however, bucked the trend and almost alone emerged from the crisis even more revered and admired than he had been already. And now, with the arrival of “Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence,” Paul A. Volcker has finally been awarded a meticulous historical account of exactly how he reached his exalted position.

Alex Beam: Review of John G. Turner's "Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet"

Alex Beam, a columnist for The Boston Globe, is writing a book about the death of Joseph Smith.For a young religion, Mormonism seems to have more history than it knows what to do with. The church’s founding fathers were outsize, operatic characters: the prophet Joseph Smith, who believers claim received and translated “The Book of Mormon,” and his successor, Brigham Young, who “preserved a church and created a people,” according to this new biography by John G. Turner, an assistant professor of religious studies at George Mason University.But until he met Joseph Smith, Brigham — the Mormons, or Latter-day Saints, call both Smith and Young by their first names — was a 29-year-old transient nobody in upstate New York who “lived on the economic margins of his society,” and wasn’t particularly religious. He relished the sense of community he found among the Mormons and was much moved by his early encounters with Smith (“He took heaven . . . and brought it down to earth,” Young recalled). Yet half a lifetime later, that unlettered ex-husbandman ruled over a theocratic empire as large as France. Turner calls Young “the greatest colonizer in American history,” who established Mormon outposts in present-­day California, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho and Wyoming.

Ron Radosh: Review of Paul Kengor's "Under the Influence: The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor"

Ron Radosh is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, a columnist for PJ Media, and the author of Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left.In the 2008 campaign, the media, generally speaking, showed a remarkable lack of interest in some of the background of the man who ended up winning the presidency. In this important new book, author Paul Kengor points to one person in particular who had a singular influence on our current president, a man who was his mentor while he attended high school in Hawaii and with whom he was in contact during his college years as well.

Matt Taibbi: Review of Seth Rosenfeld's "Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power"

Matt Taibbi, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine, is the author, most recently, of “Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History.”America never got over the ’60s. The deep social divisions that emerged during that decade remain, for the most part, the divisions that define modern American politics. The battle lines are still so painfully visible that 50 years after the beginning of the Vietnam War and the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, the presidential race this year will come down to a contest between a former community organizer pilloried for supposed ties to ’60s radicals and a former Stanford student who protested against campus antiwar demonstrations.Moreover, the current culture war being played out between watchers of Fox News and readers of The Huffington Post is really the same old ’60s argument, pitting social conservatives’ unshakable faith in American exceptionalism against the progressive insistence that there’s something dark and violent at the core of American hegemony. These two sides have painstakingly constructed competing versions of recent American history, leaving us without even a common set of historical facts to debate.

Molly Worthen: Review of David R. Swartz's "Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism"

Molly Worthen is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.In 1968, Mark Hatfield, one of America’s most prominent evangelical politicians, wanted to abolish the draft and clandestinely wore a Eugene McCarthy pin under his lapel. A Republican senator from Oregon, Hatfield had fans in evangelical churches around the country. When organizers of the 1973 National Prayer Breakfast invited him to address Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and other conservative luminaries (the Vietnam War was a “national sin and disgrace,” he told them), he based his remarks on a text written by a renegade seminarian named Jim Wallis — a former member of Students for a Democratic Society who believed that being “pro-life” meant hating war and poverty as much as abortion.

Gary J. Bass: Review of John Fabian Witt's "Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History"

Gary J. Bass, the author of “Stay the Hand of Vengeance” and “Freedom’s Battle,” is finishing a book about the Nixon administration and the 1971 massacres in Bangladesh.In recent years, the American debate about war — about torture, drone strikes, the killing of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan — has also been a debate about the international laws of war. But much of this law, as John Fabian Witt shows in his magnificent new book, was originally made in America.

David Greenberg: Review of Robert W. Merry's "Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians"

David Greenberg, a professor of history, journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, is the author of “Nixon’s ­Shadow: The History of an Image,” among other works of political history.One night a few months ago, my 7-year-old son — who during the Republican primaries developed a mildly obsessional interest in presidential history — asked me to rank the American chief executives in order of greatness. With bedtime looming, I resolved to make it quick. Rattling off the successes (George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt) proved easy, as did listing the failures (James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon). But filling in the middle drove me crazy. Should William McKinley place higher or lower than Gerald Ford? Martin Van Buren above or below Rutherford B. Hayes? Yawning, and under pressure from my eager son, I randomly plugged in Millard Fillmore, Chester A. Arthur and the Harrisons and called it a night.

Thomas J. Sugrue: Review of Joshua B. Freeman's "American Empire" The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945-2000"

Thomas J. Sugrue is David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.“One of the central themes of American historiography is that there is no American empire.” So wrote the eminent historian William Appleman Williams in 1955. During the subsequent decades, there was a revolution in the study of American empire, first by historians of international relations (mostly on the left), including Williams, Walter LaFeber and Lloyd Gardner, who emphasized the economic impetus behind US expansionism. More recently, imperialism has fallen under the purview of cultural historians like Emily Rosenberg and Victoria de Grazia, who in different ways foregrounded the ambition to spread the gospel of consumerism and liberal development abroad. Mary Renda and Paul Kramer, among others, have powerfully linked the efforts to dominate people of color both at home and abroad (US policies in Haiti and the Philippines grew from the poisoned soil of Jim Crow and racial restriction). Still others have emphasized the culture of masculinity that pervaded America’s overseas adventures, from Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders through the Green Berets in Vietnam.

Janet Maslin: Review of Evan Thomas's "Ike's Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World"

Janet Maslin writes book reviews for the New York Times.Until very recently, Dwight D. Eisenhower has done a remarkably good job of hiding in plain sight. The Eisenhower era, the Eisenhower jacket and the still in-the-works Eisenhower memorial (planned for Washington) attract more news attention than the man himself does....Even this year, when new books and reprints about the 34th president abound and Eisenhower revisionism is on the rise, the subject remains below the radar, or at least without wide readership. Evan Thomas’s “Ike’s Bluff,” a bustling, anecdotal book with a high-concept premise, aims to change all that.

Thomas Meaney: Review of Sudhir Hazareesingh's "In the Shadow of the General: Modern France and the Myth of de Gaulle"

Thomas Meaney is a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University and an editor of The Utopian.Picture him as a legend, Joan of Arc in drag.   A great nation is conquered by its historic enemy and the General is forced to flee. From a foreign shore, he rouses his people to resistance. Four years later, he marches through the capital in triumph, determined to reunite a country torn apart by faction. But these are democratic times, and he requires more power than the Constitution allows. The people balk at his requests. After a long tug of war, he retreats to his country estate. The nation fails to heal, and its colonies begin to seethe with discontent; the people agitate for the General’s return, and he answers their call. He makes the nation great again—and, in an unexpected twist, he unravels the empire in the name of universal liberation. The nation becomes a shining example of how to conduct international affairs in a new world, as the General charts an independent course between two rival superpowers. But the people fail to acknowledge their debt to him. Only after they have pushed him out of power for the last time do they come to see him as their savior.

Mark Lewis: Review of Rich Cohen's "The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King"

Mark Lewis is writing a book about America’s colonial experience in the Philippines.Amid the vast outpouring of literature about America’s banana empire in the Caribbean, no one seems to have written a full-fledged biography of the remarkable Samuel Zemurray, who guided the United Fruit Company through perilous times. Rich Cohen has rectified that oversight. Cohen, the author of “Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams” and “Sweet and Low: A Family Story,” now gives us the fascinating tale of “Sam the Banana Man,” a poor Russian Jew who emigrated to Alabama as a teenager and ended up controlling much of Central America.After starting out as a humble banana peddler in Mobile in the 1890s, Zemurray moved up to become a major importer in New Orleans, shipping in fruit from his firm’s plantations in Honduras. When the Honduran president, Miguel Dávila, placed obstacles in his path in 1910, Zemurray simply hired some mercenaries, orchestrated a sham revolution and replaced Dávila with a more compliant president. Cohen duly condemns Zemurray’s colonialist arrogance but also admires his chutzpah. At times, Cohen waxes almost Kiplingesque as he celebrates the man and his myrmidons....

Fergus M. Bordewich: Review of Joseph Wheelan's "Terrible Swift Sword"

Mr. Bordewich's most recent book is "America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union."One of the most fascinating passages in "Terrible Swift Sword" describes an encounter that took place not on a battlefield of the Civil War, where Union Gen. Philip Sheridan earned his fame, but in German-occupied France during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Sheridan, on leave from Indian-fighting on the western frontier, had attached himself as an observer to the victorious Prussian army, where he established a personal friendship with Otto von Bismarck, the architect of German unification. Asked by Bismarck how he thought the Germans should respond to costly French guerrilla attacks, Sheridan unhesitatingly replied: "The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with after the war." He advised that the insurgents be hanged, their villages burned and their lands laid waste until they begged for peace. While some Germans found this advice unacceptably cruel, Bismarck took it to heart. There should be "no laziness in killing," he ordered.

Jonathan W. Jordan: Review of John J. McLaughlin's "General Albert C. Wedemeyer"

Mr. Jordan is the author of "Brothers, Rivals, Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, and the Partnership That Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe.""World War II," wrote Adm. William Leahy, President Roosevelt's wartime chief of staff, "was the best-charted war ever fought. Everybody had charts for everything. We even had a section of the Government devoted solely to telling the rest of the Government how to make charts." The ubiquitous charts—together with such equally mundane cousins as tables, memoranda and staff studies—were the first weapons that America's high command wielded against the three Axis empires. Through them, men were drafted and trained, uniforms and equipment were procured, and Allied strategy took form amid a vast stew of logistical, political and industrial considerations.The generals who ponder these crucial questions have always been less heralded than those who led through smoke and fire. This makes John J. McLaughlin's study of one of the U.S. Army's key planners all the more welcome....

Alan Brinkley: Review of Fredrik Logevall's "Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam"

Alan Brinkley is Allan Nevins professor of history at Columbia University....Fredrik Logevall’s excellent book “Choosing War” (1999) chronicled the American escalation of the Vietnam War in the early 1960s. With “Embers of War,” he has written an even more impressive book about the French conflict in Vietnam and the beginning of the American one — from the end of World War II to the beginning of the second Vietnam War in 1959. It is the most comprehensive history of that time. Logevall, a professor of history at Cornell University, has drawn from many years of previous scholarship as well as his own. And he has produced a powerful portrait of the terrible and futile French war from which Americans learned little as they moved toward their own engagement in Vietnam.

Marilyn Stasio: Review of Ginger Strand's "Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate"

Marilyn Stasio is the Crime columnist for the Book Review.What would highway killers do without highways?In 1956, Congress passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, authorizing the construction of 42,795 miles of an interstate road system. In 1958, while the first stretch of highway (I-80 between Omaha and Lincoln, Neb.) was still under construction, America’s first highway killer, 19-year-old Charles Starkweather — who already had one murder under his belt — jumped into his ­secondhand Ford with his 14-year-old girlfriend and hit the road on a killing spree that began in Nebraska, ended in Wyoming and left 10 people dead.Coincidence? Ginger Strand thinks not. In “Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate,” Strand, the author of “Inventing Niagara,” draws startling parallels between the inexorable advance of the Interstate System and the proliferation of killers who were pathologically stimulated by that long, open road. By transforming established travel habits, the new highways certainly enabled the swift and anonymous mobility conducive to criminal behavior. But speed and anonymity are precisely the features that make highway travel attractive, so it was inevitable that the nation should have reservations about its new roads....

Richard Toye: Review of Antony Beevor's "The Second World War"

Richard Toye’s most recent book is “Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made.”Toward the end of this powerful narrative of World War II, Antony Beevor quotes a report, by the Australian war correspondent Godfrey Blunden, of an encounter with some American troops who had just been released from German P.O.W. camps. They had been in Europe only a few months, thrown into combat and almost instantly captured during the Ardennes offensive, Hitler’s last big throw of the dice. The men now had “xylophone ribs” and “gangling arms.” Some of their fellow prisoners had been beaten to death by their guards for attempting to take sugar beets from fields. Blunden wrote: “They were more pitiful because they were only boys drafted from nice homes in a nice country knowing nothing about Europe, not tough like Australians, or shrewd like the French or irreducibly stubborn like the English. They just didn’t know what it was all about.”

Alida Becker: Review of "Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel: A Nine-Hundred-Year-Old Story Retold"

Alida Becker is an editor at the Book Review.“The biographer’s trap,” John Guy remarks in “Thomas Becket,” his portrait of that foremost friend turned foremost foe of Henry II, “is to look for a decisive moment of change.” But, he adds, “to do that is to write the history of the saint without his shadow.” With ­Becket, this temptation often seems to have been irresistible, from the very night of his murder, Dec. 29, 1170, near the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral. As a crowd swooped down on the battered corpse of the archbishop, tearing off pieces of clothing to dip in the gruesome puddle of his blood and brains, the outlines of the story of Becket’s sudden conversion from ­luxury-loving chancellor to ascetic defender of the church were already being rehearsed, soon to be followed by tales of his miraculous powers.