Review by Choice Review
In this thoroughly researched, well-organized book, Gerwarth (Univ. College Dublin) contends that the phrase "interwar years" is grossly misleading as applied to Europe between the two world wars. Rather, the continent, and, more specifically, those nations on the losing side of the war, suffered continuing bloodshed, destruction, and dislocation on a scale that made these regions "the most violent place on earth" between 1918 and 1923. Rebutting Churchill's dismissive contention of these conflicts as merely "wars of the pygmies," Gerwarth notes that "well over four million people" died during these years. This catastrophe, Gerwarth asserts, grew out of three types of conflict: battles between national armies in the successor states, widespread civil wars, and the political violence growing out of social and national revolutions. Postwar violence was increasingly unrestrained because those involved saw these conflicts as existential. Gerwarth also challenges the traditional understanding of the "brutalization thesis," arguing that Europeans were "brutalized" not so much by the horrors of trench warfare as by the circumstances in which the war ended for the losers. Defeat, imperial collapse, and revolutionary turmoil provided the grounds for the appalling inhumanities of these years. Though the violence receded between 1924 and 1929, the issues that spawned it remained unresolved. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Blaine T. Browne, emeritus Broward College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
THE CRISIS OF THE MIDDLE-CLASS CONSTITUTION: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic, by Ganesh Sitaraman. (Vintage, $17.) The Constitution was predicated on having a thriving middle class, and today's widening inequality poses an existential threat. In this call to arms, Sitaraman excels in "helping understand how our forebears handled it and building a platform to think about it today," Angus Deaton wrote here. LINCOLN IN THE BARDO, by George Saunders. (Random House, $17.) In 1862, Abraham Lincoln visits the grave of his young son Willie, where he encounters a chorus of ghosts in limbo. Their voices - of slaves and slavers, doomed soldiers, priests - narrate the country's descent into war; as Lincoln mourns he becomes a steward of the nation's tragedies. The novel won the 2017 Man Booker Prize. BLEAKER HOUSE: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World, by Nell Stevens. (Anchor, $17.) As part of her M.F.A. program, Stevens is awarded a fellowship to travel virtually anywhere; she chooses the remote Falkland Islands to complete a book. Her memoir traces the fits and starts of the writing process and shares some hard-won insight. "Surrounded by people, it is easy to feel alone," she writes. "Surrounded by penguins, less so." A SEPARATION, by Katie Kitamura. (Riverhead, $16.) An unnamed, 30-ish British narrator tracks down her estranged husband, Christopher, in Greece after her mother-in-law intervenes; Christopher is traced to the southern Peloponnese, where he's supposedly studying mourning rites - and where marital deception proliferates. Our reviewer, Fernanda Eberstadt, praised the novel's "radical disbelief - a disbelief, it appears, even in the power of art - that makes Kitamura's accomplished novel such a coolly unsettling work." THE VANQUISHED: WHY THE FIRST WORLD WAR FAILED TO END, by Robert Gerwarth. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $17.) In the years between 1918 and 1923, crumbling empires, economic depression (along with the lure of Communism) and flawed peace negotiations helped set the stage for another global conflict. Gerwarth's fine history examines the legacy of World War I, with a focus on the "mobilizing power" of defeat. THE HEIRS, by Susan Rieger. (Broadway, $16.) A cryptic final wish sets off a knotty family drama; as the Falkeses mourn their patriarch, Rupert, a woman emerges and claims he was the father of her two sons. The evidence is plausible enough, and his family struggles to interpret the news. "Rieger convinces us that knowing the truth - believe it or not - doesn't necessarily settle everything," Caroline Leavitt wrote here.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 6, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
On November 11, 1918, the guns fell silent as an armistice officially ended the fighting in what was then called the Great War. But, as historian Gerwarth illustrates, the slaughter and massive dislocation continued well into the following decade in central, eastern, and southern Europe. By 1918, the great European empires Russia, Austro-Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey had collapsed. These multiethnic, multilingual anachronisms were oppressive and inherently unstable, yet they kept the lid on a welter of seething hopes, resentments, and hatred that now boiled over. The most massive of these explosions of violence was in Russia, where civil war pitted Whites against the Bolsheviks. Greeks, Turks, various southern Slavic groups, and German-speaking communities also went after each other, motivated by religion, ultra-nationalism, or political hostility, both with conventional armies and, more commonly, within small towns and villages where mixed ethnic and religious populations fought each other. Sadly, the end of these struggles was no end at all as WWII loomed. This is difficult, often horrifying reading, but Gerwarth provides an essential contribution to our understanding of the interwar years.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this controversial, persuasive, and impressively documented book, Gerwarth (Hitler's Hangman), professor of modern history at University College Dublin, analyzes a war that was supposed to end war, yet was followed by "no peace, only continuous violence." The war's nature changed in its final years: Russia underwent a revolution, and the Western Allies committed themselves to breaking up the continental empires. The postwar violence was "more ungovernable" than the state-legitimated version of the preceding century. Gerwarth establishes his case in three contexts. The Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, enjoyed a taste of victory in the winter of 1917-18, only to suffer the shock of seeing their military, political, and diplomatic positions quickly collapse. Russia's revolution immersed Eastern Europe in what seemed a "forever war" of only fleeting democratic triumphs. Fear of Bolshevism in turn stimulated the rise of fascism. And the Versailles negotiations proved unable to control the collapse of prewar empires, much less guide their reconstruction along proto-Wilsonian lines. The period of relative stability after 1923 was a function of exhaustion rather than reconstruction, Gerwarth ruefully notes, and by 1929 Europe was "plunging back once again into crisis and violent disorder" that set the stage for the Great War's second round. Maps & illus. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Review by Library Journal Review
Historian Gerwarth (modern history, Univ. Coll. Dublin; Hitler's Hangman) writes an accessible and astute account of the interwar period, specifically the post-World War I years between 1918 and 1923. The author effectively details changes in violence after the end of World War I as postwar Europe devolved into interstate wars between Poland and the Soviet Union, Greece and Turkey, and Romania and Hungary along with several civil wars (e.g., Finland, Ireland, and Germany). The result of this bloodshed emerged in the 1920s as two radically different ideologies, Bolshevism and Facism, both of which led to violence in several countries such as the Red Terror in Russia and the rise of Benito Mussolini in Italy. Gerwarth succeeds in describing the sectarian violence, economic insecurity, and blame of "the other" (more often than not, Jewish communities) that was born out of the Great War and led to an even bloodier battle. Readers of European history will find much to contemplate. -VERDICT This work does not have the glamour of World War theater, but it adequately provides an important bridge between two massive conflicts that still resonate with us today.-Keith Klang, Port Washington P.L., NY © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The first study of the disorders that shook all the defeated states of Europe following World War I.For the nations that lost the war, the fighting did not end with the armistice in November 1918. On the contrary, Gerwarth (Modern History/Univ. College, Dublin; Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich, 2011, etc.) asserts that between 1918 and 1923, postwar Europe was "the most violent place on the planet." Russia, of course, was swept up in its own revolution and civil war. While the victors connived in Paris to reorganize a continent previously dominated by land empires into one composed of nation-states, from the Baltic to the Caucasus, the territories of the collapsed Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman empires were torn by civil wars and revolutions of their own and by interstate wars like the ill-advised Greek invasion of Turkey in 1919. As a result, writes Gerwarth, "none of the defeated states of the Great War managed to return to anything like pre-war levels of domestic stability and internal peace." Although the 1923 Conference of Lausanne ended the Greco-Turkish conflict and marked the exhaustion of this spasm of violence, the author contends that it laid the foundation for later ethnic cleansing because it "established the legal right of state governments to expel large parts of their citizens on the grounds of 'otherness.' It fatally undermined cultural, ethnic and religious plurality as an ideal. In this extensively researched and crisply written account, Gerwarth explores the political and military upheavals throughout central Europe, including those in unfamiliar nations like Bulgaria and radically dismembered Hungary. The authors consistent focus on national governments, paramilitary groups like the various German Freikorps, and statistical counts of victims of violence and famine at the expense of personal experiences of ordinary people caught up in the chaos sometimes renders the narrative a little dry, but it is certainly authoritative. A thorough explanation for the rise of the nationalist and fascist groups who set the stage for World War II. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
