Blight has distilled a mass of historical material into an impressive, clearly written volume that, however depressing,...
Blight (History/Amherst Coll.) describes how Americans decided to remember the devastation of the Civil War during the decades that followed.
For a year after the war’s close, Andrew Johnson carried out Lincoln’s “with malice toward none” policy. It failed. As whites resumed power in Southern states, they disenfranchised the freed slaves and passed the infamous black codes in an effort to restore as much servitude as possible. Johnson did not object: he was a Southerner, after all, and even loyal Southerners opposed equality for freed slaves. Always a minority, abolitionists and radical Republicans took advantage of hatreds fresh from the war to impose military rule and restore black rights. Within a few years, most Northerners lost their war fever. Support for Reconstruction faded, then disappeared in the mid-1870s, another failure. By this time both South and North were fashioning memories of the war that bore little resemblance to the facts. The author sorts through an avalanche of memoirs, biographies, and magazine articles, as well as fictional accounts, presented a nostalgic, sanitized version of the conflict. A new holiday, Decoration Day (later Memorial Day), changed from a simple day of sorrow for Union war dead to a national nonpartisan celebration of all who fell in battle. In the South, the war became a doomed, but noble, struggle for freedom and states’ rights; in the North it was a triumphant, but tragic, struggle to preserve the Union. Hatred—at least between soldiers—disappeared: since both sides fought a manly fight, mutual respect was essential. After this transformation, almost no one maintained that slavery caused the war, and blacks and the struggle for their rights vanished from the political mainstream for almost a century.
Blight has distilled a mass of historical material into an impressive, clearly written volume that, however depressing, reads well and rings true.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-674-00332-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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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