Modern History

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30959, 15 January 1966, Page 4

Modern History

This Is Your Century. By Geoffrey Trease. Heine-

mann. 332 pp. Index. With its sub-title, “A cavalcade of world history from 1900 onwards,” this richly illustrated and produced volume is intended as an introduction to modern history for secondary school students. Geoffrey Trease already has several historical novels and reference books for young readers to his credit. “This is Your Century” maintains the lucidity of these earlier workers, but sometimes at the price of over-simplifying the complex events it describes. It is hardly an adequate explanation of Hitler, even for young readers, to say that “violence and cruelty gave him substitutes for the satisfactions of love.”

Beginning with the death of Queen Victoria and ending with the fall of Khrushchev, Mr Trease has attempted a narrative of the political and social changes which have shaped the world of the 1960’5. Inevitably there is a heavy emphasis on war and politics, particularly British politics, but other areas are not neglected, and the chapter on the emergence of modern China is a particularly clear account of complex and bewildering events. There is also a nice balance between the glamour and horror of war, both in the text and the illustrations. And Mr Trease has taken trouble to develop the importance of the General Strike of 1926, the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression as part of his theme. Inevitably there are omissions, the most serious being the scant attention given to more recent

events, particularly the United Nations, the Korean War, and the relations of the new nations of Africa and Asia with the rest of the world.

Snippets of social changes as they affected ordinary people have been skilfully woven into the text. There is a useful reminder that mail was often delivered more quickly 60 years ago than it is today, that the motor-car has helped to destroy the individuality of communities, and that the rise of chain stores and super-markets has contributed a dreary monotony to “high street” architecture in towns and cities. Mr Trease himself says his book is intended to stimulate further inquiry, and so it should. It is regrettable therefore that he has not included a bibliography, particularly one suitable for a teen-age audience. From its 200 illustrations alone “This is Your Century” is a useful reminder of the recent past, and not only for young people. Some of them are familiar enough—such as St. Paul’s Cathedral rising amid the flames of the blitz —but many of them are striking new glimpses of half-for-gotten events. The photographs remind us how beautiful the young Madame Chiang Kai-Shek was, how the French cavalry rode to war with lances in 1914, what a mass Nazi rally at Nuremberg looked like, and what the first artificial silk stockings did for female glamour —along with cartoons from the First World War and a disheartening aerial picture of Sunday traffic trying to reach a beach in Britain in 1965.