A takeaway point well worth the price of admission, but there are many more in this solid collection. Fruitful reading for...
History teaches little and has scarce influence on the present. So why bother to study it at all?
This sometimes impatient set of essays by noted historian Wood (Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, 2006, etc.) offers a provocative answer: Knowledge of the past may not necessarily guide decisions made in the present—would that it did—but it at least “can have a profound effect on our consciousness, on our sense of ourselves.” Rather hippie-ish sentiments, one might think, but in Wood’s universe consciousness embraces the political, which can be good and bad. Thus James McGregor Burns, for instance, comes in for a shellacking in a 1982 New York Review of Books piece for imagining in The Vineyard of Liberty that the 1850s were, like the 1960s, full of revolutionary potential, lacking but a sans-culotte leader to set things in motion: “But then one sometimes forgets,” writes Wood, “that Burns is a political activist for whom writing history is really politics by other means.” Similarly, Barbara Tuchman, who had a few political axes of her own to grind, gets a gentler but still tough assessment for her insistence that history has some utility. Wood is careful to distinguish her portentous popularizing from that of David McCullough, “who genuinely seems to want just to tell a good story about the past.” Elsewhere, Wood writes approvingly of big-picture endeavors such as David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed (1989), while taking books such as Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties (1991) to task for confounding history and fiction. History does teach one big lesson after all, Wood concludes: “Nothing ever works out quite the way its managers intended or expected.”
A takeaway point well worth the price of admission, but there are many more in this solid collection. Fruitful reading for academics and history buffs alike.Pub Date: March 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-154-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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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