by William T. Sherman & edited by Simpson Brooks D. & Jean V. Berlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 19, 1999
General William Tecumseh Sherman, perhaps the Union Army’s fiercest and most complicated soldier, wages war in these letters against the Confederacy, the press—and himself. Much of the general’s correspondence has been published previously, but this collection of 400 letters compiled by Simpson (History/Univ. of Arizona; The Reconstruction Presidents, 1998) and Berlin (who served on the editorial staff for The Papers of George Washington) restores some of the general’s more colorful comments and prints for the first time other letters in manuscript collections. His letters, by his own admission occasionally “imprudent,” are not only essential for all serious Civil War scholars, but also a delight for the general reader. Sherman constantly, reveals the manifold aspects of his personality: self-doubt, depression, conservatism, intelligence, cynicism, honesty, loyalty to country and comrades, love of family, and courage. The letters begin in late 1860, when Sherman, as head of the Louisiana State Seminary and Military Academy, warns that secession will be “a crime against civilization” that will unleash anarchy. Over the next four years, Sherman writes of the battles and campaigns that made him immortal. Along the way, he discusses race relations, Reconstruction, strategy, his growing partnership with Ulysses S. Grant, and his major bugaboo, the press (“the most contemptible race of men that exist”). He bewails how rumors of his insanity in late 1861 will disgrace the family name, then recovers his self-confidence by degrees in battle. He vents despair over the death of son Willie. Above all, we witness the evolution in his perception that the will of Southern civilians must be broken in order for the war to end (e.g., telling officials who protest resettlement of Atlanta’s civilians, “I myself have seen . . . women & children fleeing from your armies and desperadoes, hungry and with burning feet . . . . Now that war comes home to you, you feel very different”). A classic of Civil War literature worthy of a place beside the general’s own Memoirs.
Pub Date: April 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-8078-2440-2
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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