History of the 20th Century

Rating:
Summary: Graduate students clipped newspapers?
Review: A very disappointing set of books, reads like strung together clippings of (primarily) political events from newspapers. Inconsistent in places, dead wrong in others, practically no synthesis. OK perhaps if you want an outline of some of the major events and when they occurred, but to get the significance and any depth of analysis, you'll have to look elsewhere. One of the strangest excuses for "History" I've ever read.

Rating:
Summary: A flawed masterpiece
Review: I can hardly imagine a more compelling (i.e., compulsively readable) account of the major events of the twentieth century than Gilbert's in the first volume of this allegedly "masterful" book; it is the events themselves that account for most of the book's interest, not any explanation of them offered by Gilbert.Gilbert's views can be inferred only from what he thinks fit to include in his book, and what not. Curiously enough, what is remarkable about the book--Gilbert's willingness to stand aside, to allow events their intrinsic interest--is exactly what many readers find fault with it--namely in the absence of a considered world-outlook, an overarching explanation of or attitude towards the events he describes. That he offers no explanation cannot be denied; but to this reader an attitude towards the events he describes is so clearly implicit in his language as to constitute a kind of intellectual autobiography: Gilbert, despite his strong commitment to England and Israel, is utterly fair-minded in describing them. (For example, he is shocked by the willingness of generals [particularly Haig and Kitchener] to feed thousands of young men to German machine guns in the interest of gaining ten feet of ground along the Siegfried line.He is staggered by the quasi-feudal political arrangement that enabled the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns to ride roughshod over the slight democratic process in place in Autria-Hungary and in Germany, and by the revolting anti-semitism of both leaders, who ignored the fact that Jews were fighting for their countries, and explained the incipient social revolution occasioned by the tragic loss of life to "Jewish-led communism.") He is willing to allow facts to speak for themselves (each major initiative in WWI is characterized in terms of numbers--of deaths, of casualties civilian and military).He believes, to some extent, that history is out of human control, and thus we get a palindrome at the end of each chapter detailing the loss of life to "Acts of God" and to sepsis. He writes a good English style, never opaque though full of implication, but his book is horrendously badly edited, a statistic on one page at variance with the same statistic on another page, and the grammatical howlers, superfluous words, bad punctuation doubtless originate in the unseemly haste with which Gilbert pours out his popular histories. Nevertheless, I would not willingly part with a single page of these books, as they purvey something more valuable than "vision": they convey a sense of the tragedy of this century, its odd, paradoxical commitment to decency hand in hand with a savage, unpitying biologically driven tendency to make a god of death and killing.

Rating:
Summary: A good overview of the 20th century, but lacks retrospective
Review: Martin Gilbert, a British Jew who has written extensively and comprehensively on history, has added to his compendiums a three-volume set on the 20th century as a whole.

Martin Gilbert's writing and selection of material is first class. He chronicles the history of the 20th century through three substantial volumes (each bout 500 pages long), covering everything from the horrors of the World Wars to Global Warming. Most of the examples reflect in some way or another the historical currents and trends at the time, and show a deep and mature understanding of history.

The written format of the book is somewhat unusual, seeming more like a series of newspaper clippings than a true study of the 20th century. But it is wrong to claim that this is merely 'collecting clippings' at random. Gilbert's selections, often tragic and poignant, magnify the human dimensions of history often neglected in more formal studies of the subject. Whether it is the promising Russian writer deported to Siberia to be shot, the cold, hungry Jew in Auschwitz, the miserable African living in a refugee camp in absolute squalor, or the harried World War I soldier, Gilbert captures them all.

The only real weakness of Gilbert's three-volume study is the lack of restrospective commentary on the events he depicts. Gilbert appears to suppress his personal views and opinions, for the main part, in favour of recording historical events objectively. This makes the work somewhat more dry and less aware of the 'human' dimension in history; a perspective badly needed for a century as violent and fast-changing as the 20th. Nevertheless, this study is a fine introduction to the history of the 20th century.