Freedman once again demonstrates his incomparable mastery of presenting complex, sweeping historical subjects in an engaging, dynamic narrative. Using his signature photo-essay format, the author examines the first modern global war that inflicted mass slaughter. He lucidly explains the complicated political situation that led to war and discusses how the first use of modern weapons such as aircraft, flame throwers, long-range artillery, machine guns, poison gas and tanks used in a war fought with old-style strategies and tactics resulted in horrific carnage. Especially vivid is the graphic depiction of trench warfare. Focusing primarily on Western Front campaigns, the narrative effectively interweaves the big picture of the war’s causes and consequences with intimate stories of individual German and Allied soldiers drawn from reports, letters and diaries. In the concluding chapter, the Newbery, Sibert and Wilder Award winner offers a brilliantly concise discussion of the direct connections between the “Great War” and the causes of the Russian Revolution, World War II and conflict in the Middle East. Carefully documented in appended chapter notes, the text is illustrated throughout with maps and stunning photographs. (Nonfiction. 12 & up)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-547-02686-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
Categories: TEENS & YOUNG ADULT HISTORY
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The story of a flawed, complicated man.
The son of a distant Minnesota congressman and a demanding, well-educated mother, young Charles Lindbergh grew up shuttling among the family farm, his grandfather’s Detroit home, and Washington, D.C. Intelligent but uninterested in school, he began flying at age 19, getting involved in barnstorming and becoming an Air Service Reserve Corps officer. He used a combination of mechanical aptitude and moxie to successfully cross the Atlantic in a 1927 solo nonstop flight and was instantly propelled into worldwide celebrity. Success came at tremendous cost, however, when his infant son was kidnapped and murdered. Lindbergh was also his own enemy: His infatuation with eugenics led him into overt racism, open admiration for Hitler, and public denunciation of Jews. Fallen from grace, he nonetheless flew 50 clandestine combat missions in the South Pacific. He became an advocate for animal conservation but also had three secret families in addition to his acknowledged one. Fleming (Eleanor Roosevelt's in My Garage!, 2018, etc.) expertly sources and clearly details a comprehensive picture of a well-known, controversial man. Her frequent use of diaries allows much of the story to come through in Charles’ and his wife Anne’s own words. The man who emerges is hateable, pitiable, and admirable all at the same time, and this volume measures up to the best Lindbergh biographies for any audience.
A remarkable biography. (bibliography, source notes, picture credits, index) (Biography. 12-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-64654-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A lovely, lively historical survey that takes in Neanderthals, Hohenzollerns and just about everything in between.
In 1935, Viennese publisher Walter Neurath approached Gombrich, who would go on to write the canonical, bestselling Story of Art, to translate a history textbook for young readers. Gombrich volunteered that he could do better than the authors, and Neurath accepted the challenge, provided that a completed manuscript was on his desk in six weeks. This book, available in English for the first time, is the happy result. Gombrich is an engaging narrator whose explanations are charming if sometimes vague. (Take the kid-friendly definition of truffles: “Truffles,” he says, “are a very rare and special sort of mushroom.” End of lesson.) Among the subjects covered are Julius Caesar (who, Gombrich exults, was able to dictate two letters simultaneously without getting confused), Charlemagne, the American Civil War, Karl Marx, the Paris Commune and Kaiser Wilhelm. As he does, he offers mostly gentle but pointed moralizing about the past, observing, for instance, that the Spanish conquest of Mexico required courage and cunning but was “so appalling, and so shaming to us Europeans that I would rather not say anything more about it,” and urging his young readers to consider that perhaps not all factory owners were as vile as Marx portrayed them to be, even though the good owners “against their conscience and their natural instincts, often found themselves treating their workers in the same way”—which is to say, badly.
Conversational, sometimes playful—not the sort of book that would survive vetting by school-system censors these days, but a fine conception and summarizing of the world’s checkered past for young and old.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-300-10883-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
Categories: TEENS & YOUNG ADULT HISTORY
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