A solid book of American history that will cause readers to grimace at the fire and fury and perhaps blush with shame for...
A historian revisits the bloody confrontations between American Indians and New England colonists in the mid-17th century, finding much behavior to deplore but one leader to admire.
Daily Beast contributor Warren (Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam, 2013, etc.) relies heavily (and explicitly) on the previous works of historians of the era, quoting extensively. But he also uses his contemporary viewpoint to analyze conflicts between the natives and the newer arrivals from England. Emerging as a towering figure of tolerance is Roger Williams (1603-1683), the Puritan minister who was determined to understand the local Narragansett and advocate for religious freedom and cultural tolerance. As Warren shows us—after rightly noting that the voices of the Indians are too often silent in the historical record—Williams, after establishing the Rhode Island colony, worked tirelessly on behalf of all; it was only when Puritan expansionism (and rampant lying and greed) grew intolerable that frontier warfare erupted. The fighting ended with predictable results, with mere numbers and superior firepower being the keys. Warren distinguishes himself by trying to understand all the motives of the principal players in this sad, sanguinary drama, but, as he reveals, it was basically the oldest story of all: people who believe their God is the only true one slaughtering those who beg to differ—and arrogating for themselves the losers’ lands and property. There are several simultaneous stories going on, and the author handles them all deftly: Williams (his banishment from Massachusetts, his establishment of Rhode Island), the power of the Massachusetts and Connecticut Puritans, the struggles of the various Indian tribes in the region, the bloody battles, and colonial historiography in general.
A solid book of American history that will cause readers to grimace at the fire and fury and perhaps blush with shame for the suffering and the shamelessness.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8041-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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