Narratively not always up to its best moments, but well researched and accessible; a persuasive reminder that we should look...
A historian peels the romantic veneer off the good old days of late-19th-century America.
Although Brands (Texas A&M Univ.; The Wages of Globalism, 1994, etc.) notes that issues and events of the 1890s have reverberated down through the 20th century, he is convinced—and convincing—that the story of that volatile decade is inherently interesting and its telling "requires no extrinsic justification.'' He charges into his first chapter, on Frederick Jackson Turner's theory on the closing of the frontier, via the gripping personal story of a man who was in the thick of the rush to grab "free'' Oklahoma land. Although he recaptures this immediacy with his discussion the bloody Homestead steelworkers' strike, Brands basically settles into a topic-by-topic exploration of major events in the political, legal, and economic history of great men and the great masses that they led (and coerced and exploited). Ruthlessness, efficiency, and available resources lead to the rise of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and John Pierpont Morgan, the last of whom was even able to personally rescue the country from possible financial default in the Panic of 1893 (for a fee, of course). Journalist Jacob Riis wrote about the misery of urban slum life, and Jane Addams, one of the book's few women, did something about it. Chicago's "boodlers'' and New York City's Tammany bosses made corruptibility a foundation of big city government. Agricultural depression and intense division over the gold standard aided the rise of Populism and William Jennnings Bryan's unsuccessful but dramatic bid for the presidency. With Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court helped erode black civil rights by accepting the separate-but-equal standard, and an increasingly imperialistic country found ample cause to meddle in Cuba, Venezuela, the Philippines and Hawaii.
Narratively not always up to its best moments, but well researched and accessible; a persuasive reminder that we should look back over our shoulder at what has gone before.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13594-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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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