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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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