Revolutionary Spring

January 1, 2023

Award-winning Vanderbilt historian Blackbourn rethinks Germany in the World, arguing that it was a persuasive force even before unification in the 19th century. Joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces and a prolific historian, Borman (Crown & Sceptre) limns the historic significance ofAnne Boleyn & Elizabeth I. In Revolutionary Spring, Wolfson Prize--winning Clark refreshes our view of the revolutions that rocked Europe in 1848. In Homelands, Oxford historian Garton Ash draws on both scholarship and personal experience to portray Europe post-World War II. In Soldiers Don't Go Mad, distinguished journalist Glass uses the friendship and literary output of outstanding war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen--both gay and both ultimately opposed to fighting--to show how an understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder and its treatment first emerged during the industrialized slaughter of World War I. Journalist Hartman's Battle of Ink and Ice shows that the contention between explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook, both claiming to have discovered the North Pole, also sparked a newspaper war with all the earmarks of fake news. The long-anticipated My Friend Anne Frank recounts Holocaust survivor Pick-Goslar's friendship with Frank (she's called Lies Goosens in The Diary of a Young Girl), having been together with her at the Westerbork transit camp and eventually Bergen-Belsen. Also known as the Graveyard of the Pacific, the Columbia River Bar forms where the river pours into the ocean off Oregon's coast and creates fearsome currents that have claimed numerous lives; like his abusive father, Sullivan risked crossing it, and he makes his book at once history, memoir, and meditation on male behavior at its extreme. Former undersecretary of defense for intelligence in the Obama administration, Vickers recalls a life in intelligence and special operations that arcs from his Green Beret days to his involvement in the CIA's secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan to the war on terror. In Road to Surrender, the New York Times best-selling Thomas (First: Sandra Day O'Connor) relies on fresh material to convey the decision to drop the atomic bomb from the perspectives of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, and Gen. Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific. In National Dish, three-time James Beard award-winning food journalist von Bremzen investigates the relationship between food and place by examining the history of six major food cultures--France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Turkey. In Beyond the Shores, the Harriet Tubman Prize--winning Walker (Exquisite Slaves) considers why Black Americans leave the United States and what they encounter when they do, moving from early 1900s performer Florence Mills to 1930s scientists to the author's own grandfather. An historian at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Walton assays the century-long intelligence war between the West and the Soviet Union/Russia, considering lessons that can be gleaned today in Spies.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 17, 2023
Bitter defeat bequeathed lasting victories in the pan-European revolutions of 1848, according to this sweeping history. Cambridge historian Clark (Iron Kingdom) untangles the chaotic political conflagrations that engulfed Europe, starting with a rebellion in Sicily; then moving to Paris, where an uprising forced French king Louis Philippe to abdicate to a revolutionary provisional government; then on to Vienna, Berlin, and other capitals where governments conceded constitutional reforms, an end to censorship, the emancipation of Jews, and other freedoms. These euphoric liberal triumphs gave way, he continues, to acrimonious divisions between middle-class revolutionary leaders and radicals who demanded guaranteed jobs, wages, and labor rights for workers—in Vienna even the choirboys went on strike—along with nationalist programs that threatened to unravel Europe’s empires. The revolutions seemed to fail in 1849, when liberals and conservatives united to bloodily reimpose authoritarian, monarchical control, but Clark argues that they left behind a durable new regime of constitutional, parliamentary, reformist politics. Clark integrates the welter of local conflicts into a coherent grand narrative, grounding it in searching analyses of the era’s economic and social tensions, political instabilities, and ideological fervors while also spotlighting the magnetic personalities (Karl Marx, Richard Wagner) and tragic romance of the upheaval. It’s a magisterial recreation of an explosion that birthed the modern world. Illus. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.

Starred review from April 15, 2023
A panoramic portrait of Europe in turmoil. Clark, a professor of modern European history, offers a sweeping view of the political turbulence that broke out across the entire European continent in 1848, "the only truly European revolution that there has ever been." He sets the stage for these uprisings with a close examination of social, economic, and political conditions throughout Europe in the 1830s and '40s, a period characterized by competition for scarce resources, low rates of productivity growth, and a "deepening of patriotic networks." In the 1830s, liberal and radical activists faced sanctions "ranging from military interventions to prosecutions, the covert sponsorship of government-friendly organizations and newspapers, and networks of spies and informants," and pressures and grievances built up and finally erupted. Examining uprisings in France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Hungary, Clark finds "no single issue at the heart of the revolutions, but rather a multitude of questions--about democracy, representation, social equality, the organization of labour, gender relations, religion, forms of state power, among many other things." Furthermore, he writes, the revolutions did not catapult radicals into power; the new parliaments created after 1848, he reveals, were predominantly conservative. Nevertheless, they ushered in "modern representative politics: "parliaments, parties, election campaigns and the publication of parliamentary debates." Clark's abundantly populated narrative features major players, such as Robert Blum, Giuseppe Mazzini, Clemens von Metternich, Alexis de Tocqueville, Marx and Engels, along with lesser-known figures, including women confronted with the "immovability of the patriarchal structure." The author thrillingly captures the excitement of cities "humming with political emotion," the effect of the uprisings on geopolitical tensions around the world, and the international interventions that "shaped the revolutions' course and conclusion." Clark makes a clear connection between the tumults of 1848--"the unpredictable interaction of so many forces"--and "the chaotic upheavals of our own day, in which clearly defined endpoints are hard to come by." A meticulously researched, authoritative history.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.