Overlooked Gilded Age crooked financier Jim Fisk receives a compelling historical exhumation.
Intending to highlight “forgotten chapters of American history,” the inaugural volume in the American Portraits Series reanimates the heady histrionics of eccentric stock broker and corporate executive Jim Fisk during his zenith in the mid 19th century. The narrative begins with Fisk’s funeral procession through the streets of Manhattan, lined with mourners both personal and professional. As his girlfriend many years prior, buxom showgirl Josie Mansfield grew weary of the “spectacle” and business cunning that garnered Fisk many lucrative associations, including partnering in 1868 with slick entrepreneur Dan Drew and tycoon Jay Gould, who, altogether, managed to seize control of the Erie Railroad from formidable Wall Street kingpin Cornelius Vanderbilt. Together with duplicitous politician William Tweed, Fisk was already embroiled in lawsuits and Mansfield had fallen for handsome associate Edward Stokes. Wanting his money but not him, she and Stokes attempted blackmail with personal letters incriminating him in illegal mischief. Brands (History/Univ. of Texas; American Dreams: The United States Since 1945, 2010, etc.) takes particular joy in unfolding the high-profile courtroom melodrama in the second half of the book with seemingly verbatim exchange of emotional testimony cresting with the imbroglio of Fisk’s violent murder at Stokes’ hand. The author makes liberal use of photographs, journalistic accounts, summaries of court proceedings and trial transcripts, all offering “blow-by-blow and word-for-word coverage” of the key players. With swift prose and exacting detail, Brands transports readers back in time to an ostentatious era rooted in swift industrialization, avarice and corruption, in which men like Fisk thrived—and ultimately perished. A wonderfully creative beginning to what promises to be a revitalizing history series.
Pub Date: May 31, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-74325-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
A richly informative, if highly problematic, overview of anti- Jewish bigotry and violence between the 1870s, when the term ``anti-Semitism'' was coined, and the Holocaust. Lindemann (History/Univ. of Calif., Santa Barbara), who has written previously on Dreyfus and other anti-Semitic cases, here focuses largely on Germany and France, with lesser attention to Russia, Great Britain, the US, Italy, Hungary, and Romania. (Curiously, a section on the interwar years almost entirely omits Poland, a country with a deep anti-Semitic tradition.) He correctly posits an indirect line between the racist anti-Semitism that characterized the beginning of the period and what Daniel Goldhagen calls the ``eliminationist'' ethos that led to the Holocaust. Lindemann also makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of both long-term socioeconomic and short-term political contingencies behind the expression of anti-Semitism. He reveals the ``comparative quality and texture in expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment'' by demonstrating that most major anti-Semites and philo-Semites were more complex than their labels would indicate. However, Lindemann's penchant for nuance ultimately takes its toll. While there is an indisputable correlation between the rise of Jewish power and influence during the 19th and 20th centuries and the intensification of political and intellectual anti-Semitism, the author comes very close to suggesting that there is a clear-cut causal relationship between the two. Thus, he refers to modern anti-Semitism as ``transparently an ideology of revenge'' and alludes to the supposed ``Jewish sense of superiority (including certain kinds of measurable Jewish superiority) and the envy/hatred it has engendered.'' Finally, Lindemann, who calls for scholars to engage in a nonpolemical study of anti-Semitism, himself lapses into highly charged statements and rhetorical questions in an odd, rambling conclusion. There's much provocative, compelling material here, but the author's conclusions are too often contradictory or unpersuasive.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-521-59369-7
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
This second of a projected 14 volumes of Martin Luther King's collected works covers the period from his postgraduate education at Boston University's School of Theology through the end of his first year as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. (his year-end report notes accomplishments ranging from carpeting the church's auditorium to registering voters). Correspondence, academic papers (and in his introduction Carson confronts head on the issue of King's plagiarism), sermons, published and unpublished writings are all included, reflecting the young man's developing thoughts about theology, ethics, and the role of the Baptist minister in his church. All the texts are annotated, and some original documents are reproduced. The longest work here is King's dissertation on the concept of God in the writings of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, a concept that differed from his own belief in a personal God. The volume leaves the young minster on the eve of a watershed in his own life, in the life of his people, and in the life of America as a whole: the Montgomery bus boycott.
Pub Date: Dec. 7, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-07951-5
Page Count: 550
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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