Category: Book Reviews

Red Cross Rose: An Aussie Civilian in France, 1916-1920

Red Cross Rose: An Aussie Civilian in France, 1916-1920

Published March 15, 2023

Reviewed by Emma Hanna

In recent years, the wartime service of civilians near the battlefields of the Great War has been highlighted by histories of the organisations with whom they worked. Historians such as Geoffrey Reznick and Michael Snape have worked to explain how and why voluntary-aid organisations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) sought to care for servicemen’s well-being wherever they were fighting. The service of hundreds of men and women who worked along the lines of communication, in camps, ports, hospitals and by prisoner of war camps, should be more visible in the war’s histories. These workers fulfilled the roles which military authorities were unable or unwilling to do. They were proud to have shared similar dangers and deprivations to those bearing arms, although they were not permitted to wear any uniform or identifying insignia until late 1917.

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Nordic Media Histories of Propaganda and Persuasion

Nordic Media Histories of Propaganda and Persuasion

Published January 11, 2023

Reviewed by Edward Corse

Nordic Media Histories of Propaganda and Persuasion, edited by Fredrik Norén, Emil Stjernholm and C. Claire Thomson, is a welcome addition to the historical literature on the topic of propaganda. The book, published by Palgrave Macmillan, is Open Access and well worth downloading here to explore issues around propaganda and persuasion in a Nordic setting. The book stems from a conference held in the summer of 2020 in hybrid format hosted by Lund University. I attended this fascinating conference virtually and I am excited to see the final result of the work the convenors and contributors have compiled over the past couple of years. Written in English, the 18 authors are largely based in the Nordic countries themselves, with two exceptions: Nicholas J. Cull (University of Southern California, USA), who has written one of the afterwords; and one of the editors, C. Claire Thomson (UCL, UK).

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The Story of Propaganda in 50 Images

The Story of Propaganda in 50 Images

Published October 19, 2022

Reviewed by Tim Luckhurst

It was his genius in war, not propaganda, that ensured King Alexander III of Macedon (356-323 BC) would be remembered as Alexander the Great. But Alexander appreciated the power of reputation. He had himself depicted on coins as the son of Zeus and his image was replicated on statues, buildings and pottery. If Boris Johnson’s study of Classics twenty-three centuries later included focus on Alexander’s use of propaganda, Mr Johnson’s approach certainly lacks the ancient Macedonian’s precision.

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Culture in the Third Reich

Culture in the Third Reich

Published February 9, 2022

Reviewed by Kate Docking

‘Culture’ is not something that instantly springs to mind when one thinks of the National Socialist regime. Indeed, images of relentless barbarism dominate our perceptions, and rightly so, for extreme cruelty was perpetuated during the Third Reich. However, the violence committed by the Nazis does not mean that there was a total dearth of culture. In fact, as Moritz Föllmer adeptly shows in his significant book, Culture in the Third Reich, ‘culture’ – which Föllmer defines in broad terms, encompassing not only ‘high culture’ such as opera but also ‘popular’ leisure pursuits including film, radio and light fiction – actually abounded under Nazism. Building on the work of historians such as George Mosse and Fritz Stern, Föllmer has produced the most insightful and comprehensive history of National Socialist culture to date. The broader scholarly importance of the book lies in Föllmer’s powerful argument that the ‘cultural attractiveness’ (p. 25) of Nazism significantly enabled the movement’s success.

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Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe

Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe

Published October 5, 2021

Review by David Peace

On 30 October 2020, in defiance of anti-COVID-19 measures to restrict public gatherings, over 100,000 mask-clad demonstrators took to the streets of Warsaw to protest proposed changes to Poland’s abortion laws. Only a few days earlier, on 22 October, Poland’s constitutional tribunal ruled that abortions sought on the grounds of ‘foetal defects’ or ‘congenital malformations’ were ‘incompatible’ with Article 38 of the Polish Constitution. Consequently, abortion has now become only legally permissible in Poland in either cases of rape and incest, or where there is potential threat to a mother’s life or health, or instances of irreparable damage to a foetus. Reportedly, these cases represent only 2% of all legal terminations in Poland. As Dunja Mijatović, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, stated in a tweet shortly after the announcement, the new ruling has in effect removed the basis ‘for almost all legal abortions in Poland’ and amounts to ‘a ban and violates human rights.’ However, despite the days of protest marches across Polish cities and popular backlash against the ruling, Poland’s shift towards a curtailment of access to abortion services echoes a growing trend among traditionally Catholic European countries as populist parties in Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and Croatia, seek to emulate the Polish legislative model to disrupt what they perceive to be the overt liberalisation of abortion as a reproductive right.

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The Life and World of Francis Rodd, Lord Rennell (1895-1978): Geography, Money and War

The Life and World of Francis Rodd, Lord Rennell (1895-1978): Geography, Money and War

Published September 8, 2021

Reviewed by Edward Flint

More years ago than I care to remember, when starting my PhD, a colleague, Christopher Duffy, asked if I had found the people yet. I looked at him quizzically for my head was full of the big events, the organisations, theoretical frameworks, concepts and so forth – by the end of the process I knew exactly what he meant. Plenty of names had bubbled up in the PhD but three in particular had emerged as fundamental to the development and employment of British civil affairs and military government in the Second World War.

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The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust

The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust

Published July 28, 2021

Reviewed by Ellis Spicer

This new volume, edited by Tom Lawson and Andy Pearce, includes contributions from authors of a wide range of backgrounds and expertise. It does not shy away from awkward truths or confronting representations of the past that serve the interests of the present. The editors emphasise how the past is used to understand and shape the present. History is memory in action and it is fascinating that this book places the recent events of COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, legacies of slavery in statues, and Brexit as paramount to the ways in which history is consumed, reacted to and communicated in our modern society.

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The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History

The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History

Published June 16, 2021

Reviewed by Vittoria Princi

If the bicentenary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s death has managed to make everyone agree on one thing, it is that the Corsican-born general-turned-emperor remains as much a symbol of his epoch (the “soul of the world on horseback”, in the famous definition by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel) as a deeply divisive figure. This was very true already in his intense life and times, and it is still so in the distant posterity of the 21st century, as even the celebratory speech given by French president Emmanuel Macron on 5 May 2021 had to acknowledge. Insisting on Napoleon as a “great man of history”, however, eclipses the bigger picture of a worldwide, two-decades-long conflict embroiling Europe and whose ramifications spanned nearly all over the global order of its times. A helpful book to keep this wider context in mind is The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History, by Alexander Mikaberidze.

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China

China

Published June 3, 2021

Reviewed by James Farley.

The Communist Party of China (CCP) recently released a new version of their appraisal of the country’s history, entitled ‘中国共产党简史’ (Brief History of the Communist Party of China). Following in the tradition of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and their ‘short course’ that began in 1938, the China series has always provided a concise, and officially approved, guide to the history of the Party, and by extension the development of the country. The Brief History has always existed to combat what the Party terms ‘Historical nihilism,’ or rather what are perceived to be ‘incorrect’ analyses of China’s history. Whilst the content of each ‘short course’ is naturally heavily weighted in favour of the CCP, analysis of each entry in the series can provide insight into current development concerns and the standing of former leaders, as the books are framed to support current political, economic and social aims and objectives. The most recent edition, published in February 2021 for example, contains 530 pages, 147 of which focus on 2012-2021 and the leadership of the current Chairman of the Party, Xi Jinping. By comparison, the Mao years are only given 33 pages. The past is certainly being utilised to serve the future.

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Britain’s War: A New World, 1942–1947

Britain’s War: A New World, 1942–1947

Published May 12, 2021

Reviewed by Chris Smith

This book, the second volume of Daniel Todman’s mammoth history of Britain’s Second World War, picks up where the previous volume left off in 1941. Unlike the majority of histories of Britain’s conflict, which tend to focus on only one aspect of the war, Todman’s work aims to be completist – or rather as completist as any single history (even in two volumes) of Britain and the Second World War can hope to be.

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