An excellent study that complicates the heroic portrayal of the Revolution.
A pox-centric history of the American Revolution.
If not for variola major, the virus that causes smallpox, the American colonies may have achieved independence from Britain a lot sooner. Fenn (History/George Washington Univ.) contends that the sickness, especially in the early days of the Revolution, was one of General George Washington’s worst enemies. In two major battles at the outset of the war—in Boston and Quebec—it almost ruined the Continental Army, which was composed of American-born recruits who had not developed immunity to the Old World virus. British troops and German mercenaries, on the other hand, were almost always immune. The author deals with the enormous organization required to handle soldiers who contracted the disease. Inoculation was proven to work in the late-18th century, but it knocked out those inoculated for a few weeks, hardly the best situation for an army on the move. When Washington finally ordered mass inoculations—rubbing a bit of flesh from a smallpox sufferer into a healthy person’s open wound—it was the first such mass public-health campaign in American history. Loyalist forces suffered also, however, including the British-backed Ethiopian Regiment, a force of freed slaves who, if they hadn’t been laid low by the pox, might well have turned the tide of the Revolution in the South. Fenn also uses smallpox to show how interconnected the world was in 1776: A pox epidemic that probably came from infected material or people from New Orleans started in Mexico City in 1779. Colonists moving throughout New Spain then spread it across North America, with cases cropping up in traders in the Hudson Bay Company in Canada. The real losers in the battle against smallpox were Native Americans, who were particularly susceptible to the virus because of their close genetic similarities. Most tribes had already suffered from smallpox before the Revolution, however, with at least one tribe dwindling in number from 100,000 to 17,000 between 1600 and 1680.
An excellent study that complicates the heroic portrayal of the Revolution.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8090-7820-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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