A detailed account of the less idealistic economic and political motivations that inspired the American Revolution.
Respected and controversial historian Jennings (Benjamin Franklin, Politician, 1996, etc.) again subjects the conventions surrounding the creation of the US to intense scrutiny. He argues that early historians gloss over the complexities of the Revolutionary War in favor of creating idealistic and romantic revolutionary figures: for instance, George Washington's shady manipulation of the courts to secure himself vast tracts of land disappears when traditional historians cast him as a righteous and virtuous republican founder. By exposing the hypocrisy inherent in many of these national myths, the author documents an American Revolution where personal economic and political aspirations fuel secessionist fervor. This transforms the celebrated rhetoric about freedom, liberty, and democracy into war propaganda for inspiring popular support. To advance this claim, Jennings scrutinizes colonial dealings in slave trade and Native American affairs and concludes that the revolution, while it freed the colonies from British rule, did not bring the virtuous democracy of our traditional histories into being—it merely created a new white ruling class. Therefore, the American Revolution, while worthy of study, is just one in a series of small steps toward a more perfect liberty. Many revisionist histories fail because they support an ideology at the expense of objectivity. Jennings's account, however, succeeds through a fair and honest reevaluation that not only sheds light on commonly neglected areas, but also provokes thought about uncomfortable aspects of our heritage.
An outstanding supplement to the many conventional histories of the American Revolution, Jennings's history offers both an objective account of the conflict and challenging insights about historical distortion.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-521-66255-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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