Customer Reviews

The United Nations: A Concise History (Anvil Series (Huntington, N.Y.).)

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Professor O'Sullivan's book and the small book that you can get when you tour the actual UN containing the Charter of the UN and the ICJ Statute might be all the documentation for the UN you will ever need as this sprightly little volume has a healthy measure of official UN documents that comprise the last third of the book. This volume should satisfy scholars, foreign policy and world affairs buffs. Similar in spirit to the "Cambridge Concise History" series, the reader is taken through a very logical and brisk tour of the UN and consequently 20th Century world history. Time is sometimes compressed in a such a way as to make the reader feel events going by like O'Sullivan is today's Livy writing some found pages for us reading in the late 21st Century. Those of you out there who find the International Court of Justice too European will be disappointed to find out that US President Roosevelt designed it with the help of Washington Bureaucrats and was happy with it more or less to boot. Whether one loves the United Nations or hates it, this should reflect one's attitude towards humanity in general as this is mostly what the United Nations seems to be comprised of.

In a little over 200 pages, Christopher D. O' Sullivan's book "The United Nations: A Concise History" takes a complex organization and presents it in an easy and manageable read.

As an undergraduate history major, I found this book to be useful in almost all of my research papers. These papers have included UN action (or inaction) amidst the turmoil of Palestinian refugees after the 1948-1949 war and the Rwandan genocide.

Chris also supplements his work with official UN documentation, which gives this succinct and well-written book a dense body of knowledge.

I highly recommend this book to students, professors, or anyone wanting to learn more about the history of the United Nations. This book offers a lot of useful information in a short volume, and is probably the only book you will ever need on this topic.