Comprehensive account of the first permanent English colony in North America.
Perhaps because its purpose was forthrightly monetary, perhaps because it had the dubious distinction of robustly introducing tobacco and slavery to the country, Jamestown, Va., has never held a place in the nation’s collective consciousness comparable to that of the Plymouth colony. Woolley (The Queen’s Conjurer, 2001, etc.) meticulously gathers and documents all the forgotten details, and while his brilliantly framed narrative remains devoid of any warm, fuzzy uplift, it emerges as fascinating. It’s a wonder the colony survived at all, given its criminal mismanagement, the mutinies and betrayals, famine, disease, withering Indian attacks and the consequent bloody reprisals. Luck surely played a part: Settlers were loaded into ships and just about to abandon Jamestown in 1609, when a longboat rowed up with news of a fleet carrying supplies just arrived in Chesapeake Bay. Certainly, the leadership of tireless explorer, self-promoter and propagandist John Smith was important. Also crucial was the Trinidad tobacco seed planted by John Rolfe, later husband to Christian convert Pocahontas, who made a PR mission with him to England to talk up the colony’s prospects. But the canvas was larger than this tiny beachhead in the New World. Playing a huge, underappreciated role in propping up the beleaguered colony were the reputations and fortunes of the noblemen who established the Virginia Charter and funded the expedition, not to mention the pride of England and the awful prospect of the government abandoning North America to Spain’s Catholic dominion. Woolley effectively establishes this broader context; one of the most engrossing passages here recounts the journey of the Sea Venture, whose ill-fated voyage to Jamestown resulted in the accidental discovery and claim of Bermuda. He illuminates the Virginia colony as part of a larger international game, the stakes of which simultaneously explain and dwarf the sufferings of a few adventurers in a southern swamp.
A well-told story of discovery, conquest, business and politics.Pub Date: April 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-009056-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
Categories: HISTORY | UNITED STATES
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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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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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