Acclaimed popular historian and novelist Fraser (My History: A Memoir of Growing Up, 2015, etc.) rehearses the half-century of maneuvering that culminated in the 1829 liberation of English and Irish Catholics from crushing de jure discrimination.
In 18th-century England, Catholics were a thoroughly oppressed minority. Despite the easing of some restrictions in 1778, in the early 19th century, new members of Parliament were required to swear an anti-Catholic oath. How was the government persuaded to pass “An Act for the Relief of His Majesty’s Roman Catholic Subjects” (1829), which was, in the words of one Catholic cardinal, “to us what the egress from the catacombs was to the Christians”? Fraser’s cast of characters won’t surprise readers familiar with the outlines of the story: Her three stars are Irish Catholic activist Daniel O’Connell (who, despite insisting that “ours is a moral not a physical force,” likened himself to Simón Bolívar) and, in Downing Street, the Duke of Wellington and Robert Peel, pragmatic politicians who served, respectively, as Prime Minister and Home Secretary. Both eventually championed Catholic Emancipation not out of a sudden love of Rome but because they feared that if they did not, “we must look to civil war in Ireland sooner or later” (as the Duke wrote to Peel in 1824). The supporting cast of anti-Catholic bigots included William Wordsworth, various Archbishops of Canterbury, and Mrs. Arbuthnot, a salon hostess who seems to have stepped out of a Trollope novel (it’s disappointing that Fraser didn’t make more use of Arbuthnot’s pungent two-volume diary). Though marred by the occasional cliché (“these were…fighting words”), Fraser’s account is salted with delicious details. For example, speaking in Parliament against emancipation, Attorney-General Charles Wetherell (who may have been drunk) gesticulated so aggressively that his suspenders broke and his pants started to fall down.
Not for readers seeking innovative analysis but a perfectly solid and sometimes-entertaining overview of the great men who brought about vital political change in Britain.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-54452-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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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. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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