Incomparable sources make for an unusually intimate American portrait.
The lives and fortunes of ambitious 19th-century brothers.
Jesse Fletcher (1762-1831) raised 15 children in Ludlow, Vermont, struggling to eke out a living from his farm and fighting recurring depression. In a vividly detailed history, Smith (An American Betrayal: Cherokee Patriots and the Trail of Tears, 2011, etc.) focuses on two of those children to tell both a story of the family and of America from the early 19th century through Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and the end of the Civil War. Those 50 years saw vast political, social, and technological changes as urban centers burgeoned and “canals, turnpikes, steamboats, railroads, and the telegraph” linked east and west—and America to Europe. All those transformations had an impact on the Fletchers. Elijah (1789-1858) was a favored son who saw education as the path to escape his father’s hard life. After graduating from college, he took a teaching job in Virginia, where he was at first horrified by slavery. But he married into a wealthy family and soon owned a plantation, along with slaves. Calvin (1798-1866) was rebellious, leaving home at 17, bouncing around the country from one meager job to another until he finally settled down to become a lawyer, banker, and landholder in Indianapolis. He also was a punctilious diary keeper, leaving almost 5,000 pages of material from which Smith constructs a seamless, detailed narrative. Because Calvin left such a rich paper trail, he and his children become the main focus of the family’s story. As a father, one of his sons remembered, Calvin “was stern and demanding, relentless in case of lapse from duty and behavior.” Diary entries reveal his constant worry over his sons’ educations, career prospects, and morality. But he also turned to public life, taking strong and vocal positions on the abolition of slavery, intemperance, and school reform, all major issues of the day.
Incomparable sources make for an unusually intimate American portrait.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-137-27981-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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