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JUBAL

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GENERAL JUBAL A. EARLY, CSA, DEFENDER OF THE LOST CAUSE

Osborne (Verdi, 1987; Schubert and His Vienna, 1985, etc.) makes a solid foray into military biography with this crisp narrative about Lee's pugnacious and erratic subordinate. In swift and unremarkable succession, Osborne relates the salient facts about Jubal Early: son of a wealthy Virginia planter; competent though reluctant West Point cadet; unwilling, and largely inactive, soldier in the Seminole and Mexican Wars, with a brief period as military governor of Monterey; country lawyer and Whig politician (and, ironically in light of his later die-hard Confederate views, a staunch opponent of Virginia's secession ordinance); and general under Lee. While Osborne demonstrates that Early was an effective Civil War battlefield commander, pointing out Early's key roles in such victories as Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, he doesn't neglect his subject's many failings as a man and as a military leader. Osborne describes, for example, Early's pyrrhic victory at Monocacy (which, though a nominal Confederate victory, prevented him from consummating his raid on Washington, D.C.); his failure to take Cemetery Hill on the first day of Gettysburg and his subsequent attempts to blame James Longstreet for the defeat there; and his contemptuous underestimation of his gifted opponent Phil Sheridan and the crack Union cavalry in the 1864 Valley campaign, which contributed to several decisive Confederate disasters. After the war, Early became known as one of the most virulently ``unreconstructed'' of the former Confederates, contributing in writing and public addresses to the creation of the myth of the noble Lost Cause. Osborne breaks little new ground and fails to plumb Early's motives or complex personality; nonetheless, his engaging biography gives due attention to a Confederate who has been unfairly neglected by Civil War scholars. (Maps, 16 pages of photos—not seen.)

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-945575-35-1

Page Count: 608

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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