Probably won’t settle any arguments.
A dark episode of the Civil War comes under scrutiny by an author who admits to having a fascination with 19th-century massacres.
Fort Pillow, Tenn., on the Mississippi River, housed some 650 federal troops in 1864. Among the soldiers, two types were locally hated with particular passion: “Tennessee Tories,” or homegrown unionists, and former slaves who had donned Yankee blue. On April 12, a force of some 2,300 veteran Confederate cavalrymen under Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest traveled across the western counties of Tennessee to attack Fort Pillow. Forrest, notes Ward (Dark Midnight When I Rise, 2000, etc.), had plenty of reason to despise both the Tories and the African-Americans in the Union ranks, for he had been a slave trader before the war, and unionist and abolitionist ideas were strong in much of the state. As Ward observes, Tennessee was the last of the Southern states to secede and enter the Confederacy, and was effectively the first to be reabsorbed into the Union. Not that that made life any easier for the former slaves; the unionists and the Union Army generals alike considered them to be well-suited for the heavy grunt work involved in being artillerists—“heaving shells and cannonballs, hauling cannon into place, pulling caissons, driving mules.” When Forrest’s troops arrived, they immediately set about butchering Yankees and former slaves: As Ward documents, scores were killed after they surrendered, as they did after a vigorous battle, one that the Confederates, by a contemporary account, considered “the hardest contested engagement that Forrest had ever been engaged in.” The battle remains surrounded in controversy: For their part, some Northern historians consider the attack on Fort Pillow to have been a premeditated massacre, whereas some Southern historians have ascribed the post-surrender killings to the confusion of battle, the alleged drunkenness of the artillerists and the like.
Probably won’t settle any arguments.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03440-1
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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