Reviews and Comments

I might come back and add to my review to discuss Clark's exploration of the meeting of the conservatives and reactionaries, and the liberals and proletariat in across Europe in 1848 but wanted to note at least one thing: the writing is good. I noticed him with some artful constructions and nice turns of phrase. He really loves the craft of prose as much as the story of the history he's telling.

The author begins by opining on the lack of general understanding or knowledge of the Eastern Front of the First World Word. This book was written to rectify that gap, which it does at a high level. It gives a history at the highest strategic level, tracking the Eastern Front from the outbreak of the war on through the later opening of the fronts in the wider Balkans, the Russian Revolution, and on past Brest-Litovsk until the November 1918 armistice nominally ended all fighting by the Central Powers. The author was all business and this book does the job well, but at times didn't feel like it was more than clinically plugging a dire hole in general knowledge of this front of the war.

Growing up this was THE book. I read this again and again. It has everything: family and love, comfort and loss, humor, passion, inspiration. I cannot recommend this enough to everybody and everyone. I read a quote from it at my mother's funeral (she first gave it to me). But honestly, even beyond my personal sentimental affection for it it stands on its own.

One of the great strengths of this book was the huge range of sources Clark drew on. Beyond just the range of voices a reader might expect to encounter with the use of primary correspondence he adds in the products of sociology and economic history to add further depth and context to the human stories at the heart of this period in English history. The difficulty is that these sources were not always well integrated: transitions between different sections drawing from different domains with sudden switches from talking about a very personal experience to calculating some profit to the crown or something across only a vague bridge of commonality in subject material underlying the switch in academic lens.

The book was filled with interesting anecdotes and stories; Faust documents the deep links to and role the experience of mass death during the Civil War played in lives and the national psyche. However, somehow for me it didn't feel like it had a united, coherent argument. It was a litany of tragedy and memory.

Title says it all. At another time where the nation was fracturing along political lines this book looks at how society escalated, choosing at key times to raise the stakes, and how it ultimately led to massive violence in the form of the Civil War.

Really great sequel! It would be so easy to turn this series into a mystery-a-book series, but it's doing a great job balancing shorter mysteries clearing leading to a Big Bad. It following some of the conventions of the first book, but broke with it enough to keep things fresh and find a whole net set of tropes and legacies to borrow from and add to.

A compelling of the first third-ish of the so-called long nineteenth century by British Marxist Eric Hobsbawm. It is generally compelling and engaging. Beyond the normal arguments about how and Cold War-era Marxist has aged from today's standpoints, Hobsbawm came across to me as pretty hand-waving when it comes to much of the non-European world, with some obvious exceptions (the US) and limited and conditional other exceptions (Japan). I don't know if greater attention to places and times he glosses over would change his argument, but it would undoubtedly have enriched it.