A public-private partnership between the United States Military Academy and Rowan Technology Solutions reshapes the six chapters of the academy's History of Warfare on the Civil War to bring its specialist curriculum before a general audience.
Edited by Rogers, Seidule and Watson, three current members of the academy's history department, the volume assembles contributions from five of the country's most distinguished historians of the Civil War: Mark E. Neely Jr., Joseph T. Glatthaar, Steven E. Woodworth, Earl J. Hess and James K. Hogue. “The Civil War was the most traumatic event in the United States Military Academy’s history,” writes Seidule in the introduction. “During the 1850s, the Academy changed from an institution that promoted nationalism to a bitterly divided school.” The book begins with Neely's contribution on the border states and origins of the war and concludes with Hogue’s writings on Reconstruction. Glatthaar and Woodworth divide the war in the East and West between them, and Hess takes on strategy coordination and the final phases of the war. Threaded throughout the text are campaign and battle maps and an extensive collection of contemporary illustrations, including portraits, cartoons, leaflets, newspaper reproductions and posters. The 50-plus maps in the collection provide campaign overviews as well as timelines and deployment details illustrating chains of command, numbers of troops by unit and special equipment. The series about Ulysses Grant's campaign in the West, with three maps on the Kentucky campaign, five on successive operations against Vicksburg, and two others including Chickamauga, are exemplary. Also included in the volume are full-page illustrations of significant leaders—including Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox and the only confirmed photograph of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg—and the uniforms of different branches of the service.
The volume provides a richness of political context as well as showing how the war was transformed from an initial defense of the Union to a war for emancipation.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476782621
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | UNITED STATES | MILITARY | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
A clear, useful guide through the current chaotic political landscape.
GET IT
A sharp explanation of how American politics has become so discordant.
Journalist Klein, co-founder of Vox, formerly of the Washington Post, MSNBC, and Bloomberg, reminds readers that political commentators in the 1950s and ’60s denounced Republicans and Democrats as “tweedledum and tweedledee.” With liberals and conservatives in both parties, they complained, voters lacked a true choice. The author suspects that race played a role, and he capably shows us why and how. For a century after the Civil War, former Confederate states, obsessed with keeping blacks powerless, elected a congressional bloc that “kept the Democratic party less liberal than it otherwise would’ve been, the Republican Party congressionally weaker than it otherwise would’ve been, and stopped the parties from sorting themselves around the deepest political cleavage of the age.” Following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, many white Southern Democrats became Republicans, and the parties turned consistently liberal and conservative. Given a “true choice,” Klein maintains, voters discarded ideology in favor of “identity politics.” Americans, like all humans, cherish their “tribe” and distrust outsiders. Identity was once a preoccupation of minorities, but it has recently attracted white activists and poisoned the national discourse. The author deplores the decline of mass media (network TV, daily newspapers), which could not offend a large audience, and the rise of niche media and internet sites, which tell a small audience only what they want to hear. American observers often joke about European nations that have many parties who vote in lock step. In fact, such parties cooperate to pass legislation. America is the sole system with only two parties, both of which are convinced that the other is not only incompetent (a traditional accusation), but a danger to the nation. So far, calls for drastic action to prevent the apocalypse are confined to social media, fringe activists, and the rhetoric of Trump supporters. Fortunately—according to Klein—Trump is lazy, but future presidents may be more savvy. The author does not conclude this deeply insightful, if dispiriting, analysis by proposing a solution.
A clear, useful guide through the current chaotic political landscape.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0032-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2020 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
