Publisher's Weekly Review
British historian von Tunzelmann (Red Heat) skillfully and artfully integrates the complex, simultaneous Suez and Hungarian crises of 1956 into a single story of Cold War conflict as no one has before. Her day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour, staging of events and of the characters who caused and managed them is a deeply researched achievement. If there's a pivot to the book, it's U.K. Prime Minister Anthony Eden's unhinged feelings about Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose government seized and blocked the Suez Canal. But the Soviet-American military stakes were probably higher in Hungary, whose tragic fate was left to Soviet brutality. That neither crisis precipitated world war was thanks in large part to the Eisenhower administration's determination, in the midst of Ike's reelection campaign, not to aid Britain, France, and Israel in reversing Nasser's canal seizure, and its less defensible decision to leave Hungary to its fate. Snappy prose and revealing evidence carry the often riveting story along. But it's hard to find an argument, idea, or interpretation anywhere in the book-that is, to learn von Tunzelmann's considered views. If fact-filled narrative were all there was to historical writing, this book would be unsurpassed; history being more than chronicle, the book suffers as a result. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A tale of political bungling with tragic consequences on two continents.Following the nationalization of the Suez Canal by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt in July 1956, the governments of Great Britain, France, and Israel entered into a scheme for a joint invasion of Egypt. Each nation's leader had his own motivations, including control of the canal and oil pipelines, Nasser's support for Algerian rebels, Israeli access to the Red Sea, and a strong dislike of Nasser personally. Attempts to keep their collusion secret quickly led them into a tangle of lies to their alliesin particular the United Statesto the United Nations, and sometimes to their own governments. The resulting invasion in October and November was a colossal diplomatic, political, and military fiasco resolved when an infuriated Dwight Eisenhower forced a British withdrawal by withholding support for the plummeting pound. This neo-colonialist folly further rendered Western governments incapable of confronting the Soviet Union when it crushed the Hungarian uprising that, by coincidence, occurred during the Suez crisis. For Eisenhower, who faced an election in early November, Suez was the mother of all October surprises. Guardian columnist von Tunzelmann's (Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean, 2011, etc.) narrative cracks along like an international political thriller as she tracks the action day by day, sometimes hour by hour. The British prime minister, Anthony Eden, leads the cast of characters; unhealthily obsessed with Nasser, his quixotic effort to reassert British dominance in the Middle East effectively ended Britain's status as a great power. The author lays bare at every turn the arrogance, complacency, incompetence, and wishful thinking that drove British and French decisions in a story that could appear as comedy were it not for the death, destruction, and diplomatic wreckage that resulted. A fine new account of an unnecessary crisis that "scattered dragon's teeth on all-too-fertile soil, which would bear gruesome fruit for decades. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In the fall of 1956, within a span of two weeks, two simmering crises exploded into armed conflict in Egypt and Hungary, threatening a direct confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and exerting immense influence on the subsequent history of Europe and the Middle East. On October 29th, Israel, determined to drive back Arab guerrilla fighters attacking Israeli settlements, invaded the Sinai peninsula and drove the Egyptian army back towards the Suez Canal. Two days later, Britain and France invaded Egypt, claiming that they intended to separate the warring parties. But Israel, Britain, and France had actually conspired in the joint invasion, with Britain and France hoping to reverse Egyptian leader Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal. Von Tunzelmann views this as an effort of the two imperialist nations to strengthen their declining roles in world affairs. The British and French forces quickly became bogged down. On November 4th, the Soviets, convinced that Western powers were distracted, sent massive forces into Hungary to crush a popular, anticommunist revolt. Von Tunzelmann deftly describes and links these twin struggles and offers excellent profiles of the key players, including Nasser and Eisenhower, shown here as the true hero for his wisdom and restraint. This is an outstanding reexamination of these sad, history-altering events.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN THE MID-19TH century, the historian Thomas Carlyle popularized the Great Man Theory, arguing that history was made by the heroism of soldiers and statesmen. The Great Man Theory has long since been junked by academics, if not popular historians. The course of history, the scholars say, owes more to impersonal forces and serendipity than to the efforts of some dead white males. That is true enough, but from time to time, at critical instances, great men have made a difference, for better or for worse. The Suez crisis of 1956 was one of the moments. It began as a last gasp of colonialism, a plot by Britain and France, working with Israel, to reclaim the Suez Canal, recently nationalized by Egypt. The scheme was the fruit of human folly, principally and most notably that of the British prime minister, Anthony Eden. The grand conspiracy was doomed to fail. The canal was blocked for months, causing a crippling oil shortage in Europe. The Arab-Israeli conflict worsened, and the Muslim world was inflamed against its old overlords in the West with lasting consequences. The botched invasion occurred just as the Soviet Union was crushing a rebellion in Hungary, its Eastern bloc satellite. When the Kremlin, seeing the opportunity to divert international attention from its own outrages, issued a letter widely interpreted as a threat to attack London and Paris with nuclear weapons, the great powers seemed for an instant to be lurching toward World War III. The turmoil and danger created by the Suez crisis and the Hungarian rebellion have largely faded from popular memory. With "Blood and Sand," Alex von Tunzelmann, an Oxford-educated historian with an eye for human detail as well as a sure-handed grasp of the larger picture, does a marvelous job of recreating the tension and bungling that swept up Cairo, London, Moscow, Budapest, Paris and Washington during the harrowing two weeks of Oct. 22 to Nov. 6, 1956. The background of the crisis was complex, and some readers may get slightly dizzy as the author corkscrews back in time from her gripping narrative. But the ultimate reward is a deeper understanding of the forces at work, as well as a wild ride down a zigzag trail left by the flailing of men with bloated and broken egos. Von Tunzelmann begins her yarn with an arresting anecdote related by Anthony Nutting, a minister in the British Foreign Office. It was March 1956, and Nutting had been working on a plan to lessen the influence of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic president of postcolonial Egypt. Interrupted at dinner at the Savoy Hotel, Nutting took a call from Prime Minister Eden. "What's all this nonsense about isolating Nasser or 'neutralizing' him, as you call it?" Eden said, shouting over the phone. "I want him murdered, can't you understand?" Nutting (in his own telling) began to protest but Eden insisted: "I don't want an alternative. And I don't give a damn if there's anarchy and chaos in Egypt." Then the prime minister hung up. Eden is a tragic if rather unappealing figure in von Tunzelmann's account. Bred to his class at Eton and Oxford, he looked the part of a perfect gentleman. He took first-class honors in Persian and Arabic at Oxford, and during his career at the Foreign Office, he had shown sensitivity to the emergence of nationalism in the Middle East. He had served bravely on the Western Front in World War I and capably as Winston Churchill's foreign secretary during World War II. But he was not well. "His flashes of temper and fragile nerves led some to wonder about his genetic inheritance," von Tunzelmann writes. "His baronet father had been such an extreme eccentric - complete with episodes of 'uncontrolled rages,' falling to the floor, biting carpets and hurling flowerpots through plate-glass windows - that even the Wodehousian society of early-20th-century upper-class England had noticed something was up." As prime minister, Sir Anthony took to calling ministers in the middle of the night to ask if they had read a particular newspaper article. "My nerves are already at breaking point," he told his civil servants. In October 1956, he collapsed physically for a few days. According to one of his closest aides, he used amphetamines as well as heavy painkillers, and a Whitehall official said he was "practically living on Benzedrine." He was obsessed with Egypt's Nasser, the leader of a group of nationalist army officers who had deposed the pro-British monarchy in 1952 and seized the British-and French-controlled Suez Canal in July 1956. About two-thirds of Europe's oil was transported through the canal; Nasser had his "thumb on our windpipe," Eden fumed. Eden made Nasser "a scapegoat for all his problems: the sinking empire, the sluggish economy, the collapse of his reputation within his party and his dwindling popularity in the country at large," von Tunzelmann writes. Resentment sharpened into vendetta. Over the summer and fall, Eden concocted a cockamamie scheme, called Operation Musketeer, to stage an Israeli invasion of Egypt, followed by an Anglo-French peacekeeping force for the "protection" of the canal. The Israeli and French conspirators had their own foolish reasons for going along; significantly, the United States was kept in the dark. FORTUNATELY, WHEN THE CRISIS broke, Eden's recklessness was foiled by the calm resolve of the American president, Dwight Eisenhower. Genial in public and so fond of golf that he installed a putting green outside the Oval Office, Eisenhower was easy to underestimate. But having liberated Western Europe as supreme allied commander and seen firsthand the waste of war, he was determined as president to keep the United States out of armed conflict. He also had an "instinctive sympathy with the postcolonial predicament," von Tunzelmann writes. Eisenhower was not always well served by the rhetoric of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles or the machinations of his brother, Allen Dulles, the director of central intelligence. And Eisenhower had a temper. "Bombs, by God," he shouted when the British began striking Egyptian air fields. "What does Anthony think he's doing? Why is he doing this to me?" But Eisenhower was shrewd and he could be coldly calculating. Understanding that the British would need to buy American oil, he quietly put Britain into a financial squeeze, forcing Eden to back off the invasion. Eisenhower was also, unusually for an American president, willing to say no to Israel. The Suez crisis blew up just as America went to the polls to vote on a second term for the president. His staff secretary, Andrew Goodpaster, recorded: "In this matter, he does not care in the slightest whether he is re-elected or not. He feels we must make good on our word [to defend Egypt]. He added that he did not really think the American people would throw him out in the middle of a situation like this, but if they did, so be it." When others were losing their heads, Eisenhower kept his. Though never explicitly stated, the take-away from von Ttinzelmann's book is obvious: When it comes to national leadership in chaotic times, temperament matters. Which makes her book not only exciting and satisfying but also timely. 'What's all this nonsense about isolating Nasser?,' Anthony Eden said. 'I want him murdered.' EVAN THOMAS, the author of "Ike's Bluff" and "Being Nixon," is working on an authorized biography of Sandra Day O'Connor.
Library Journal Review
Offering a day-by-day accounting of the international crisis over the Suez Canal in 1956, this latest work by Tunzelmann (Indian Summer) explains the canal's profound importance and consequence for Egypt, Israel, England, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Arguably, the most significant part of this gripping tale is the role of President Dwight Eisenhower although other pivotal actors are critically analyzed: Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, French Prime Minister Guy Mollet, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Eisenhower, soon to face his 1956 reelection campaign, clearly relished the historical linkage with the likes of Great Britain and France, yet desired no war, conventional or nuclear, to assist those nations in either maintaining or expanding their respective empires. At the hands of Tunzelmann, Eisenhower is portrayed as the most levelheaded of the leaders, while Eden is cast in a more negative light. Readers will realize global actors don't solve problems so much as they do their best to cope with them. VERDICT This convincingly argued book is a timely and insightful must-read for anyone who cares about Middle Eastern history or 20th-century diplomacy, as well as students of global -affairs.-Stephen Kent Shaw, Northwest Nazarene Coll., Nampa, ID © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
