A comprehensive biography of the Confederate guerrilla leader (1833—1916), with an emphasis on his Civil War exploits. Ramage’s (History/Northern Kentucky Univ.; Rebel Raider: The Life of General John Hunt Morgan, not reviewed) well-documented volume charts the progress of Mosby from a boyhood victim of playground bullies to an icon of the Confederacy. Proceeding in fairly chronological fashion, Ramage focuses on Mosby’s stunning career as a guerrilla leader, a man who was shot several times (once in the groin—the bullet remained in his body), who quoted Lord Byron while he harassed the Union troops relentlessly despite repeated attempts to capture or kill him. Ramage is most at ease in these sections, moving steadily (if unspectacularly) through descriptions of strategies and firefights that generally end with Mosby’s men stealing Union horses and supplies (which they divided among themselves), killing enemy soldiers, and disappearing into the woods like, well, gray ghosts. The author credits Mosby with innovations in guerrilla strategy (e.g., in close combat, his cavalry used two handguns each instead of the traditional saber) and more than once characterizes him as “one of the most brilliant minds in the history of guerrilla war.” The final 66 pages deal with Mosby’s long post—Civil War life. He was, among other things, a private attorney, US consul in Hong Kong, an employee of the US Interior and Justice departments, a popular lecturer and writer. He even portrayed himself in a lost silent film. Ramage sometimes slips into the biographer’s trap—admiring his subject so thoroughly that he can utter only a rare discouraging word about Mosby, who owned slaves and once shot an unarmed classmate. Also unconvincing is the cereal-box psychology Ramage applies to Mosby—viz., his boyhood battles with bullies explain his ferocious fighting spirit. A volume that will become the standard reference on Mosby—intelligent and thorough, but at times flattering rather than analytical. (32 b&w illustrations, 7 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8131-2135-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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