The author’s unrestrained advocacy can be annoying, but he provides a strong portrait of an undervalued general.
Revisionist biography of the Union general who overcame long odds to win the war in the West.
Bobrick (The Fated Sky: Astrology in History, 2005, etc.) makes his views clear from the outset, arguing that Grant and Sherman, both of whom outlived George Thomas (1816–70), promoted their own reputations at his expense. A Virginian by birth, Thomas excelled at West Point, where Sherman was his roommate. His career after graduation was typical of his generation of officers: the Seminole War, the Mexican War and a stint as instructor at West Point, where he befriended Lee. In 1855, he was appointed to the 2nd Cavalry, an elite regiment created by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis that included among its officers 16 future generals, 11 for the Confederacy. When the Civil War came, Thomas remained with the Union despite his Southern origin and connections. Sent to Kentucky to train recruits, he won a significant battle at Mill Springs in early 1862 and was a key figure in the Union victory at Stones River later that year. His real fame came toward the war’s end, when he was instrumental in the battles of Chattanooga, Chickamaugua, Atlanta and his greatest triumph, Nashville, where he essentially destroyed the Confederate army in the West. While giving a clear account of all these events, Bobrick piles up evidence that Grant, Sherman and even Lincoln not only failed to recognize Thomas’s brilliance, but consistently acted to prevent his rise. He also argues that Sherman and Grant were bunglers, the one a megalomaniac, the other an alcoholic butcher who battered his opponents into surrender at the cost of his own men’s lives. After the war, Thomas’s natural modesty kept him from aggrandizing or profiting from his reputation. He served honorably in Reconstruction duty and showed no political ambition, though some urged him to run against Grant for president. Bobrick attributes his death from a stroke to anger provoked by a letter denigrating his generalship, possibly written at Grant’s instigation.
The author’s unrestrained advocacy can be annoying, but he provides a strong portrait of an undervalued general.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9025-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
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