An exhaustively detailed account of the movements of the Macbeth men, as told from their point of view.
A detailed history of a Confederate artillery unit.
In his nonfiction debut, Askew reflects on how he was first inspired to write a history of the Macbeth Light Artillery unit during the Civil War, due to his familiarity with his own family history: His great-grandfather had fought in the conflict and received a severe head injury—and, according to family lore, he’d been saved by a doctor who’d placed a silver dollar in the hole in his skull. The author eventually came to believe that much of what he’d learned about the Civil War was “half-truth and myth.” While doing some research, Askew came across a cache of newspaper articles that were pseudonymously written by Lt. Hazel Furman Scaife, a veteran of the Macbeth Light Artillery. After reading Scaife’s comment that the “Macbeth Light Artillery has an unwritten history that must be wrested from oblivion by the surviving members of the company,” the author decided to take it upon himself to write this history. The book offers a detailed account of the unit as it traveled around the Asheville, North Carolina, area in the last year of the war. Askew follows the men on boring marches, during their encampments in town and field, and into combat, always paying attention to the men’s moods and the weather. Askew also consistently echoes the point of view of his principal source: “Most stories of conflict depict good against evil, protagonists versus antagonists,” the author writes at one point. “While these concepts are blurred in war, the Confederates in Western North Carolina knew the villain in the drama being played in the mountains and his name was [Union Army Col.] George W. Kirk.”
The intensely local flavor is one of the book’s more notable qualities, as is Askew’s skill at bringing the day-to-day life of an artillery unit to life. Time and again, thanks to the author’s granular research, readers will feel as if they’re standing right there with the men of the Macbeth: “They followed an old mill road, quite steep and rugged and after struggling with the cannons to the mountain top had to secure the gun carriages with ropes gripped by teams of men holding the conveyances in check ‘to keep them from running over the horses.’ ” Askew thoughtfully adds an overlay of historical awareness to the account—noting, for example, the moment that the disbanded Confederate soldiers pass the Cowpens, a battle site where, as the author puts it, the soldiers’ “dreams of Southern Independence had been crushed.” His extensive research appears sound and careful, and his book joins a large bookshelf of similarly specific regimental histories. Readers of such histories will note Askew’s own argumentative stances on larger Civil War issues, and many will take issue with them; he asserts, for instance, that “slavery was an important factor in the War Between the States, [but] it was not the definitive cause of the conflict,” which he sometimes refers to as “WBTS.”
An exhaustively detailed account of the movements of the Macbeth men, as told from their point of view.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64468-576-1
Page Count: 536
Publisher: Covenant Books
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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