A worthy work that draws on previously unknown correspondence to give a lively, from-the-saddle view of life as a rebel...
A sturdy life of the Confederacy’s knight-errant, “the bold and dashing cavalier” who evoked chivalry in a theater of carnage and slaughter.
Born in 1833 in Virginia, James Ewell Brown Stuart was a middling cadet at West Point and a touch undistinguished as an officer on the Western frontier, where the Comanches managed to elude his cavalry scouts. Nevertheless, writes Civil War historian Wert (The Sword of Lincoln: The Army of the Potomac, 2005, etc.), Stuart advanced in the officers’ ranks in the federal army. Perhaps his crowning moment was serving alongside senior officer Robert E. Lee in suppressing the abolitionist John Brown’s attack on the armory at Harpers Ferry. Stuart sided with Virginia in the secession and, owing in part to his friendship with Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson and Lee, particularly the former, he achieved high command in the Confederate forces. Though pious and a nonsmoker and nondrinker, Stuart was Jackson’s opposite in taking a joyous view of life, a lightness that delighted his soldiers, even if many complained that he was also a stern taskmaster and even tyrant who told his soldiers on the battlefield, “You don’t want to go back to camp I know; it’s stupid there and all the fun is out here.” Under Stuart, Virginia troops approached the federal capital several times; the Virginia cavalry also did outstanding service at battles across the state. Stuart was brave and daring, writes Wert, if too sensitive to his public image. His vaunted charge at Gettysburg was tactically questionable and cost many lives, and in the retreat he broke from Lee’s force to conduct an ill-advised raid, which leads Wert to conclude that “Stuart failed Lee and the army in the reckoning at Gettysburg.” It would not be the last poor decision Stuart made, but he had the good fortune—doubtless Stuart would have considered it such—to be felled in battle and be enlisted in the Confederate pantheon.
A worthy work that draws on previously unknown correspondence to give a lively, from-the-saddle view of life as a rebel horseman.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-7819-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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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