A useful history of how “the terror of this unprecedented war long outlived the stacking of arms at Appomattox.”
This Civil War history begins where most end, showing what happened to the men who fought to preserve the Union.
Jordan’s (Civil War Studies/Gettysburg Coll.) book is about the postwar tribulations of Billy Yank. While the civilian population had had enough of war, those who fought for the North were unwilling to forgive and forget, and they marched in Washington a few weeks after Robert E. Lee surrendered and Abraham Lincoln was murdered. Two million boys in blue had fought in the war, and more than 800,000 were mustered out in six months—more veterans than the country had ever known. In a nation that evidenced little appreciation beyond bombast for their sacrifices, there was no national welfare policy, network or veterans’ service. The Yanks had difficulties getting home. Many had lost limbs, and many were unemployable and fell victim to alcoholism. Illness, poverty and suicide were endemic badges of service. Like soldiers throughout history, they treasured mementos of battle. More than warriors of the past, they united in the postwar fight for recompense and respect. They returned to battlefields like Gettysburg and prison camps like Andersonville and erected monuments to mark their presence. They created newspapers, wrote memoirs and histories, and established benevolent organizations—the most effective of which was the Grand Army of the Republic. They campaigned for decent pensions and federal “asylums” to house those who were impoverished and disabled. Jordan doesn’t need to emphasize the obvious contemporary parallels. Assiduously researched—half the volume is occupied by a bibliography and copious notes—his book is entirely founded on the words of those who fought, extracted from letters, recollections and reflections. The boys in blue who rallied around the flag are gone, but in Jordan’s history, their words survive.
A useful history of how “the terror of this unprecedented war long outlived the stacking of arms at Appomattox.”Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0871407818
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
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
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