With efficiency and élan, Ecelbarger gives an often overlooked battle its due.
Civil War historian Ecelbarger (The Great Comeback: How Abraham Lincoln Beat the Odds to Win the 1860 Republican Nomination, 2008, etc.) closely examines the crucial battle of the campaign for Atlanta, the war’s most decisive engagement.
Antietam, Vicksburg, Gettysburg—each marked an important turning point in the Civil War, but none spelled the end for the South as did Atlanta. Militarily, the daylong battle on July 22, 1864, the bloodiest day of the war’s last ten months, assured the eventual capture of the South’s most important rail and commercial center. Politically, Atlanta’s surrender guaranteed Lincoln’s reelection, eliminating any chance that the war-weary North would allow the Confederacy to go its own way or return to the Union with slavery in place. Military buffs will appreciate Ecelbarger’s meticulous recounting of the battle—he breaks the action into increments as narrow as 15 minutes—the ferocity of which accounted for more than 10,000 casualties and kept one out of five participants from answering the next day’s roll call. The author’s careful reconstruction demonstrates how, with four hours of daylight remaining, the outcome could easily have turned into a Union disaster. Readers less consumed with precisely how the battle unfolded will likely prefer the numerous, sharp appraisals of the officers and soldiers. Conspicuous for the South was the aggressive John Bell Hood, whose command featured the likes of hard-drinking and hard-fighting Benjamin Cheatham, oft-wounded William “Shot Pouch” Walker, young “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, experienced Patrick Cleburne and William Hardee, who led the flanking maneuver critical to Hood’s designs. Gen. James McPherson, a protégé of Grant and Sherman, led the Northern army and died in the battle, but the slack was taken up by the inspirational John Logan, the tenacious Mortimer Leggett and Medal of Honor winners Manning Force and John Sprague. Their battlefield heroics enabled a triumphant Sherman to telegraph his president, two months before the election Lincoln believed lost, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”
With efficiency and élan, Ecelbarger gives an often overlooked battle its due.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-56399-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Essays (most originally published in the New Yorker) providing a lucid account of the chaotic course of Indian politics since 1982. Mehta (Up at Oxford, 1993, etc.) tells the colorful story of Indian politics through a series of emblematic tales of envy, intrigue, and betrayal. The cast of characters encompasses Indira Gandhi's family, Congress Party politicians and their clients, and new Sikh and Hindu communalist leaders. With his characteristic attention to detail, Mehta illuminates the significance of the exact words used by Mrs. Gandhi to eject her late son Sanjay's widow, Maneka, from her home, resulting in Maneka's political counterattack; the particular British university degrees that Rajiv Gandhi falsely claimed (both Cambridge and London universities deemed him ``not a suitable candidate for a degree''); and the precise length and width of the enormous Indian paper ballots. The big story is of a country teetering toward collapse as Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi successively lose control of politics, endanger national unity by mishandling regional and religious conflicts, and die at the hands of assassins. Mehta deploys durable Western stereotypes of India to make his story intelligible. Indian women are dependent and helpless; Sikhs are fiery religious extremists; Indian mobs are elemental forces beyond anyone's control. Worst of all for a Western intellectual or tourist, the phones do not work. These exotic defects Mehta links explicitly to India's status as a medieval country where religious fanatics and old-fashioned Congress Party socialists stand in the way of a successful passage to the modern world. Mehta's innocent faith in market forces and progress make a complicated story meaningful but also perpetuate Western anxieties about the alien, unpredictable, and menacing character of modern India. (3 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-300-06038-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
This graphic account of the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution will put to rest any remaining romantic notions about Chairman Mao. First published in France in 1989, the book recounts the author's life in a ``bourgeois'' family (her grandfather was a banker, her parents actors). Born just days before Mao declared the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Niu-Niu was four when armed Red Guards invaded her home and took her parents to a reeducation camp as punishment for their unspecified ``counter-revolutionary'' crimes; she did not see them again for eight years. The girl found refuge with her grandparents, who were the subject of local Communist Party criticism meetings that took the form of beatings. Her grandfather was finally beaten to death, and young Niu-Niu was derided in her neighborhood and at school as the ``child of criminals.'' She and her grandmother had so little food that the child took to stealing to supplement their diet. The outcast Niu- Niu became a member of a children's gang involved in a wide array of petty theft; she was continually in trouble with the authorities. Once her parents were allowed to return home after the official end of the Cultural Revolution, she shaped up long enough to pass her exams and enter a Beijing university specializing in film production. Niu-Niu's constant rebellion against the school's efforts to make students conform to the Communist Party line ultimately led to her expulsion. Her perseverance and courage in the face of tyranny will overwhelm readers. The book ends with her departure from China for a new life in France with a French citizen she later married. (They are now divorced.) The excellent translation does justice to this remarkable story. An important depiction of recent Chinese history too quickly being forgotten in the rush to seek trade with China.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-89733-410-8
Page Count: 285
Publisher: Academy Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
