by David Detzer ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2006
A solid account for the non-specialist audience.
A detailed history of the Civil War’s opening weeks, before the clash of armies began.
Third in a trilogy on the war’s first 100 days, this volume by Detzer (Emeritus, History/Conn. State Univ.) covers the period between Allegiance (2001) and Donnybrook (2004): “a critical time,” the author writes, “when America’s two sections stumbled noisily into war.” The primary focus is on Washington and its vicinity, although the author discusses events in Philadelphia, New York and other areas as they relate to the main story. A pressing issue after the firing on Fort Sumter was whether Maryland, a slave state, would remain in the Union or cast its lot with the Confederacy. Virginia’s decision to secede confronted Lincoln and Winfield Scott, the senior U.S. general, with the prospect of an enemy close enough to bombard the White House from its own territory. If secessionists prevailed in Maryland, the nation’s capital would find itself surrounded by hostile territory. When Federal troops from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania were attacked by rioters while changing trains in Baltimore, Washington’s link to the rest of the Union appeared fragile. Detzer details the political forces at work on both sides, the logistical problems of raising armies in a nation with a tiny military establishment and Virginia’s early successes at the Harper’s Ferry arsenal and at Gosport, the key naval installation at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. He critically analyzes the persistent legend that Lee, then a mere colonel, was offered command of the Union forces before casting his lot with his native state. He examines the Confederate campaign to win recognition from England and France, on which the would-be nation pinned its hopes as much as on military action. He also draws effectively on contemporary documents, including personal diaries, to show the reaction of ordinary people to the previously unthinkable prospect of civil war.
A solid account for the non-specialist audience.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101158-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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