Globe and Mail, Canada
Nov 28 2009
History and war
A Nazi soldier inspects a group of Jewish workers in the Warsaw Ghetto
in April 1943. AFP
The year’s best-reviewed books about history and war
To read the Globe’s review of the books listed here, click on the title.
THE GAMBLE: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure
in Iraq, 2006-2008
By Thomas E. Ricks, Penguin Press, 394 pages, $31
Thomas Ricks of The Washington Post traces the risky, narrowly won
battles, some in Iraq, many in Washington, inside the Pentagon and for
the ear of George W. Bush, that averted U.S. defeat in Iraq. In a
masterful unveiling of the murky ways Washington often works, Ricks
traces how a handful of think-tank experts, a retired general and
academics convinced an embattled president that the only chance to
avert defeat was to stake everything on a surge of troops. Paul Koring
WAR CHILD: A Child Soldier’s Story
By Emmanuel Jal with Megan Lloyd Davies, St. Martin’s Press, 257 pages, $27.95
Emmanuel Jal’s profound memoir, about his life as a boy and child
soldier in Sudan’s civil war in the mid-1980s, offers another human
face for child soldiers, an experience that may seem farfetched to
many, but believable if we allow ourselves to see the humanity of
others. His journey has brought us to see intimately what war does to
children, families and societies, the struggle to recover and ` more
important ` the strength and resilience of children. Ishmael Beah
KING’S DREAM
By Eric J. Sundquist, Yale University Press, 296 pages, $30.95
King’s Dream is an eloquent, encyclopedic and exhaustive examination
of a cultural icon and `happening’ of the 1960s: Martin Luther King’s
`I Have a Dream’ speech, a triumphant and transcendent act of oratory.
It is also a paean to that era of popular struggle for expanded civil
and human rights, as well as an elegy for the Dreamer Generation ` the
boomers ` whose protests made that progress happen. George Elliott
Clarke
A SHADOW ON THE HOUSEHOLD: One Enslaved Family’s Incredible Struggle for Freedom
By Bryan Prince, McClelland & Stewart, 280 pages, $32.99
Prince, a descendant of slaves, tells the shocking story of the black
Weems family, torn apart by slavery. It chronicles the family’s
courageous struggle against impossible odds to reunite in freedom, and
the unflagging commitment of the abolitionists who assisted them.
Prince’s concrete details of a desperate time and place bring the
family fiercely to life. It is a superb piece of scholarship. Donna
Bailey Nurse
ARMENIAN GOLGOTHA: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918
By Grigoris Balakian, translated by Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag,
Knopf, 505 pages, $42
Grigoris Balakian’s massive memoir, first published in Armenian in
1922 and now making its debut in English, is a first-hand, harrowing
account of the author’s experience during the 20th century’s first
genocide, with more than one million Armenians exterminated by the
Ottoman Turks. Weighted with eyewitness accounts and Balakian’s
prodigiously sharp memory, this book is not a scholar’s history but an
educated prelate’s, with an enviable grasp of Ottoman and European
history. Keith Garebian
THE THIRD REICH AT WAR
By Richard J. Evans, Penguin Press, 800 pages, $50
Evans’s trilogy ` of which this is the final volume ` is an invaluable
synthesis. Highly readable, it brings together the mass of recent
scholarly studies on the Third Reich. The first two volumes, on the
rise of the Nazi Party and its effect on German society, attempted to
answer pressing questions we still have about the era. The Third Reich
at War, engaging and compelling, continues the very high standard.
Evans’s trilogy has a good claim to be `definitive." James Grant
THE WARSAW GHETTO: A Guide to the Perished City
By by Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, translated by Emma Harris,
Yale University Press, 906 pages, $75
Translated from the 2001 Polish edition, this is a stunning work, one
of the most important books on the Nazi Holocaust. Presenting an
astonishing amount of information, carefully evaluated and usefully
organized, The Warsaw Ghetto is not just a lasting guide to a great
Jewish city, it is a monument to contemporary Polish scholarship and a
moving memorial to the nearly half a million Jews who suffered in one
of the Nazis’ most grotesque creations. Michael R. Marrus
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
