A well-conceived, thoughtfully written contribution to Civil War history.
Affecting portrait of an Ohio infantry regiment in the Civil War.
Jordan, a historian who has previously focused on Union veterans in the postwar era, follows a promising and fresh approach by studying the war through the lens of a single unit. In this instance, the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry was made up largely of immigrants, one of 30 “ethnically German” regiments in the Union Army. Two prevailing views of Union soldiers have emerged in the literature: one of a tireless and determined force, the other of a battle-weary mob just this side of collapsing. As Jordan demonstrates, neither view is quite correct, and neither is quite wrong. The men he portrays in this account were “betwixt and between, men who belonged but did not”—but who took it as their duty to fight for their new country. Their defeat at Chancellorsville soon led to Gettysburg. “It would be difficult to imagine a worse position than the one the 107th Ohio had been ordered to assume in Gettysburg that afternoon,” writes the author, facing down hardened Rebel fighters in a fixed-bayonet infantry charge. Before these battles, the 107th had endured Ambrose Burnside’s infamous “Mud March” and been elevated in morale by the arrival of Joseph Hooker, who allowed the Ohioans 15-day leaves to accommodate travel west. Not all of them returned to the fight, and many who came back did not survive. At Gettysburg, Jordan writes, “of the 458 men who entered the fight that morning, no more than 171 limped back to Cemetery Hill.” Reflecting the author’s previous scholarly interest, much of the book concerns the final year of the war and the immediate postwar era, when families at home suffered from those losses as well. Movingly, he writes in an epilogue of a reunion of the regiment at Gettysburg, when the men “gripped walking sticks, not rifled muskets” and remembered their fallen brothers in arms.
A well-conceived, thoughtfully written contribution to Civil War history.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-514-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.
A popular novelist turns his hand to historical writing, focusing on what shipwrecks can tell us.
There’s something inherently romantic about shipwrecks: the mystery, the drama of disaster, the prospect of lost treasure. Gibbins, who’s found acclaim as an author of historical fiction, has long been fascinated with them, and his expertise in both archaeology and diving provides a tone of solid authority to his latest book. The author has personally dived on more than half the wrecks discussed in the book; for the other cases, he draws on historical records and accounts. “Wrecks offer special access to history at all…levels,” he writes. “Unlike many archaeological sites, a wreck represents a single event in which most of the objects were in use at that time and can often be closely dated. What might seem hazy in other evidence can be sharply defined, pointing the way to fresh insights.” Gibbins covers a wide variety of cases, including wrecks dating from classical times; a ship torpedoed during World War II; a Viking longship; a ship of Arab origin that foundered in Indonesian waters in the ninth century; the Mary Rose, the flagship of the navy of Henry VIII; and an Arctic exploring vessel, the Terror (for more on that ship, read Paul Watson’s Ice Ghost). Underwater excavation often produces valuable artifacts, but Gibbins is equally interested in the material that reveals the society of the time. He does an excellent job of placing each wreck within a broader context, as well as examining the human elements of the story. The result is a book that will appeal to readers with an interest in maritime history and who would enjoy a different, and enlightening, perspective.
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781250325372
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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