Race, patriotism, and personal heroism come together in this eye-opening early episode in Civil War history.
A Civil War tale starring a free black sailor.
Attorney and historian McGinty (Lincoln’s Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America, 2015, etc.) has uncovered another compelling, little-known gem of American history, though it’s not as bloodthirsty as the title would suggest. William Tillman, an illiterate, 27-year-old, free black man from Rhode Island, worked as a ship’s cook and steward. On July 4, 1861, Tillman and a small crew left New York Harbor on the S.J. Waring, a schooner bound for Uruguay. The Civil War had just broken out, and Abraham Lincoln ordered a blockade of the Southern coast. Less than a week into the voyage, they were stopped and boarded by the crew of the Jefferson Davis, a Confederate privateer. They claimed the ship, cargo, and crew as Yankee prizes of war. Tillman would fetch a substantial amount of money when sold into slavery in Charleston. The crew kept him and two others onboard to help sail the Waring. At night, when most were sleeping, Tillman used a hatchet he kept hidden to kill the Confederate captain and two others. The rest were put in irons. As Tillman later told an official inquiry, “I will get all I can back alive, and the rest I will kill.” They now began the dangerous journey home. Captain-less, Tillman’s experience and knowledge helped them navigate coastal waters and elude other privateers. After five harrowing days at sea, they sailed into New York Harbor, 17 days after they had left. Tillman, writes the author, received a “hero’s welcome.” His story was covered by Northern and Southern publications, and after the inquiry, he was awarded salvage money. Tillman then “slipped out of the public eye and was soon forgotten.” McGinty impressively recounts this extraordinary story of a remarkable man, the “first real hero of the conflict.”
Race, patriotism, and personal heroism come together in this eye-opening early episode in Civil War history.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63149-129-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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