Lincoln Prize winner Guelzo (Civil War Era Studies/Gettysburg Coll.; Lincoln, 2011, etc.) offers a broad, readable history of the Civil War.
As late as the 1830s, writes the author, the United States behaved more like a compact of states than a single country. Strong communal bonds kept North and South united. But economic issues divided the sections, and slavery would become the catalyst for disunion. Despite efforts to find workable compromises in the decade before the conflict, there ensued four years of “dislocation, shock, and carnage.” Based on recent historical research, Guelzo’s account goes beyond the details of generals and battles to explore the war’s ramifications on wide-ranging aspects of American society, including religion, gender and technology. While analyzing agendas and strategies and deciphering Lincoln’s thinking regarding the Emancipation Proclamation and Reconstruction, the author re-creates dramatic moments on and off the battlefields, from the looting of goods during the Richmond bread riot to a mob’s angry assault on a Union arsenal in the Boston draft riot. Guelzo discusses the important role of railroads, the telegraph and other new technologies; the lives of ordinary volunteer soldiers, who often drank to near insensibility before charges; the war’s “real killer,” disease, caused by poor hygiene and food and ignorance of bacteriology; the reasons for the war offered by intellectuals (“blatherers,” Walt Whitman called them) on both sides; and why American religion became one of the conflict’s major cultural casualties. The author also considers the war from the vantage of African Americans as well as Native Americans and other minorities, and he concludes with an astute assessment of the confusion and dislocation of the postwar years and the coming of the Gilded Age. An authoritative view of the great American trauma.
Pub Date: May 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-19-984328-2
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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