If anything, Alex von Tunzelmann reminds us, it is made. But as the past three hundred years have shown, history is not erased when statues are removed. Winston Churchill’s monument in London was daubed with the word “racist.” As these iconic effigies fell, the backlash was swift and intense. Belgian King Leopold II was set on fire in Antwerp and doused in red paint in Ghent.

Statues of Christopher Columbus were toppled in Minnesota, burned and thrown into a lake in Virginia, and beheaded in Massachusetts. Edward Colston, a member of Parliament and slave trader, was knocked off his plinth in Bristol, England, and hurled into the harbor. Lee, head of the Confederate Army, was covered in graffiti in Richmond, Virginia. From the US and the UK to Belgium, New Zealand, and Bangladesh, Black Lives Matter protesters defaced, and in some cases, hauled down statues of Confederate icons, slaveholders, and imperialists. Blood and Sand resonates strikingly with the problems of oil control, religious fundamentalism, and international unity that face the world today, and is essential reading for anyone concerned with the state of the modern Middle East and Europe.īlood and Sand includes 25-30 black-and-white photographs.An Economist Best Book of the Year In this timely and lively look at the act of toppling monuments, the popular historian and author of Blood and Sand explores the vital question of how a society remembers-and confronts-the past.

This is a revelatory history of these dramatic events and people, for the first time setting both crises in the context of the global Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the treacherous power politics of imperialism and oil. Eisenhower, the American president, torn between an old world order and a new one in the very same week that his own fate as president was to be decided by the American people. Blood and Sand delivers this story in an hour-by-hour account through a fascinating international cast of characters: Anthony Eden, the British prime minister, caught in a trap of his own making Gamal Abdel Nasser, the bold young populist leader of Egypt David Ben-Gurion, the aging Zionist hero of Israel Guy Mollet, the bellicose French prime minister and Dwight D. Over sixteen extraordinary days in October and November of that year, the twin crises involving Suez and Hungary pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear conflict and what many at the time were calling World War III. The year 1956 was a turning point in history. Eisenhower-which shaped the Middle East and Europe we know today. A lively, revelatory popular history that tells the story of both the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956-a tale of conspiracy and revolutions, spies and terrorists, kidnappings and assassination plots, the fall of the British Empire and the rise of American hegemony under the heroic leadership of President Dwight D.

Blood and sand book alex von tunzelmann