An exemplary contribution to the history of the Civil War and its aftermath.
The renowned historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction continues the story begun in his Bancroft Prize–winning In the Presence of Mine Enemies (2003), recounting those events as they played out beyond the Blue Ridge.
The Civil War was fought on many fronts but perhaps none more malleable than that in the Great Valley, which runs from Pennsylvania through Maryland and into Virginia. There, writes University of Richmond president emeritus Ayers (What Caused the Civil War?: Reflections on the South and Southern History, 2005, etc.) in this luminous account, Union armies threatened the Confederacy with near impunity, while Rebel forces attempted to do the same, as at Monocacy, Chambersburg, and other northward forays. As the author chronicles, these movements were calculated as much to prolong the war in the hope of costing Abraham Lincoln the 1864 election as to achieve any lasting military victory, reason enough for Robert E. Lee to raid into Pennsylvania, thus “making Northerners feel what it meant to live in an occupied land.” Along the Pennsylvania border of this heartland, communities of emancipated African-Americans, who contributed many troops to the Union cause, suffered raids that returned prisoners to slavery—even as, late in the war, Lee endorsed using black troops in the Confederate ranks. More than any other place, Ayers argues persuasively, the valley had special reason to fear the resumption of campaigning in the spring of 1864, when it “could come under assault from north and south, east and west, inside and outside.” It was no less contested during Reconstruction, when voting laws were engineered to displace former rebels and impose rule by so-called carpetbaggers, an early instance of gerrymandering. As elsewhere in the South, the narrative on the war and its causes diverged from that favored in the North, building a lasting division even as the Supreme Court tolerated and even encouraged “complete legal segregation, disenfranchisement, and subjugation of black Southerners.”
An exemplary contribution to the history of the Civil War and its aftermath.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-29263-3
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Roberti, a former Hong Kong correspondent for AsiaWeek, has followed the convoluted negotiations between China and Britain over the last few years and has produced a formidable narrative of high diplomatic deception and expediency. Britain took Hong Kong from China on a 99-year lease due to expire in 1997. But China has always tolerated this high-powered capitalist outpost not so much because of the technicalities of a lease as for the huge quantities of hard currency she derived from it. Roberti, like many, seems to think that the British had a shot at keeping Hong Kong out of China's clutches. But Britain wanted good relations with the Communist giant and was not prepared to sour them over Hong Kong. He also points the finger of accusation at Hong Kong's own commercial elite, who, he claims, wanted a no- fuss complicity with Beijing at the price of suppressing democracy: ``an unholy alliance of capitalists and communists.'' A colony lawyer named Martin Lee, however, had misgivings, aroused by the treaty signed by Margaret Thatcher and Zhao Ziyang in 1984. ``One country, two systems,'' the promise of a democratic Hong Kong allied with mainland China, seemed unlikely. Giving a voice to Hong Kong's ordinary people, Lee organized vociferous protest against the British sell-out. In the process, he became ``more recognizable than the governor and more popular than many pop stars.'' But the pro-democracy movement has made no difference to the eventual outcome. And here there are unpleasant truths that Roberti seems reluctant to face. Were the British really ``forcing'' Hong Kong to live under a dictatorship? The reality, surely, was that the territory's residents no longer had the power to back their wishes up. The notion of a conspiracy, though, always makes for a better read, and Roberti is certainly deft in showing us one. A shame only that he could not come up with a better villain than poor old knock-kneed Britain.
Pub Date: Sept. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-471-02621-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
The latest in a splendid series by Schell (Discos and Democracy, 1988, etc.), extending over 20 years and tracking momentous changes in the world's most populous country. Beginning almost where he left off in his last book, Schell describes the events at Tiananmen Square and their aftermath. The square has long been both a symbol of the power of successive regimes as well as a traditional site at which dissent was expressed. The demonstrations, which extended far beyond a rarefied group of students, journalists, and intellectuals, soon began to involve the urban proletariat, the very vanguard of the revolution. Deng Xiaoping, having crushed their dissent with great brutality, concluded that only economic development would save the regime. Deng is the latest in the line of Chinese reformers who have believed that China could borrow the technology and managerial methods of the West without affecting Chinese culture and values. For the moment, says Schell, the middle class has struck a Faustian bargain with the Communist Party, forgoing political confrontation while economic liberalization continues. ``By 1991,'' Schell notes, ``almost nobody in China was taking Marxism seriously.'' But the country presents the paradox of almost wild capitalist enthusiasm (with strange elements, including the success of a $1,500 limited edition Mao watch with diamond- and sapphire-studded gold casing) and a Stalinist security apparatus that presides over labor camps with 1020 million prisoners. China is now, Schell writes, irrevocably part of the world economic system, but he does not venture to predict the outcome. Schell doesn't give as immediate a sense of life in China as do Kristof and WuDunn in China Wakes (p. 826), nor has he travelled as widely, but he brings great analytical power and understanding to one of the most important political stories of our time. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-70132-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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