An honest, searching book sure to tread on the toes of supremacists and iconoclasts alike.
Virginia-based writer and teacher/historian Cleary takes on a thorny modern issue: How do we commemorate those dead who fought for the Confederates?
Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson spent a decade teaching at Virginia Military Institute, a job for which he was perhaps not entirely suited. “Then suddenly, with the war,” writes the author, “he came into his own: commanding, organizing, fighting.” Beloved of his soldiers and honored by foe Ulysses S. Grant as “a gallant soldier and Christian gentleman,” he fought doggedly for the Confederate cause in what he called “our second War of Independence” while, as Cleary notes, never apologizing for or openly supporting slavery. (Jackson did, however, own six slaves.) The author’s investigation into Jackson’s life and times begins with our own, with a Virginia monument that park rangers called “Stonewall on steroids,” which was sculpted just before World War II and has the feel of an anti-Axis superhero. While an antihero to many, Jackson is revered in the South, especially among Virginians. On that score, Cleary gamely recalls a showdown with a New York academic who disparaged Southern boorishness: “My assertion that I was a Virginian—which to a southerner would have stopped her diatribe immediately—did nothing to check the flow.” Yet, of course, that New Yorker had a point to make. Furthermore, writes the author, who spent many years teaching mostly African American students in the juvenile justice system and laments the “consequences of poverty and neglect, the legacy of the slavery that Johnson was fighting to defend,” that point needs to be heard out in Southern quarters. Cleary, who observes that “interest in the Civil War is a middle-aged white guy kind of thing,” is both sensitive and sensible, and readers along the way will learn both of Jackson’s gallantry and the essential wrongness of the enterprise for which he died.
An honest, searching book sure to tread on the toes of supremacists and iconoclasts alike.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4555-3580-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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