A fitting memorial to the farmboy turned soldier and intellectual: a must for Civil War enthusiasts.
The Civil War as seen by the author’s great-grandfather, an Illinois infantryman on the Union side.
Bobrick (Wide as the Waters, 2001, etc.) bases his account largely on 90 letters Benjamin “Webb” Baker (1841–1908) wrote home between August 1861, when he responded to Lincoln’s call for volunteers, and June 1864, when he joined Sherman’s march across Georgia. At the war’s onset, Webb was a 19-year-old farmboy, used to hard work and outdoor living. His company was sent to Missouri, where southern sympathizers threatened Union control of the state. He first saw action in the Union victory at Pea Ridge, the largest battle of the war west of the Mississippi. He was twice wounded. Then, after a period of patrolling the Missouri-Arkansas border, his company crossed the river and served in Kentucky and Mississippi before settling in Tennessee. A long series of aimless marches and idle days in camp nearly drove Baker to distraction, until they went east to fight for Chattanooga in the battles of Chickamauga and Lookout Mountain. He suffered another major wound, and worse yet, the death of his younger brother, who had enlisted several months after he did. Bobrick alternates between descriptions of the conflict as Baker experienced it and as it was fought in the country as a whole. The letters give a detailed view of war as seen by an ordinary soldier; readers can sense how Baker was sobered by battle and by the extensive reading he did while recovering from his wounds. After the war, he earned a doctorate in history and became a teacher and a minister. The last section reprints the original letters, some summarized by the transcriber who prepared a typescript after Baker’s death.
A fitting memorial to the farmboy turned soldier and intellectual: a must for Civil War enthusiasts.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-5091-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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