Haley’s highly readable book complements but does not replace Randolph B. Campbell’s more idea-driven Gone to Texas (2003),...
Texas history, like just about any other, is marked by misunderstanding and violence—but in Texas, naturally, everything’s bigger.
The first Europeans looking for gold to arrive in what is now Texas, writes native-son historian Haley (Sam Houston, not reviewed), had a vague notion they were in Mexico and found out otherwise when they wrecked on or near Galveston Island. The Karankawa Indians they met were occasional cannibals who ate only enemies; when they learned that the shipwrecked survivors ate their own merely to fend off starvation, they “declared that if they had known the Spanish were capable of such an abomination, they would have been slaughtered on the beach.” There’s lots of slaughtering in Haley’s pages. For instance, he offers a lucid, careful exposition of the siege at the Alamo, in which he avoids hero worship and iconoclasm alike while addressing questions that have occupied generations of Texas schoolchildren: Was David Crockett tortured? Were the “Texians” executed? Elsewhere, he tells the little-known story of the civil war within the Civil War in Texas, with unionists (including Sam Houston) battling rebel guerrillas. The war revealed a red state/blue state split early on; the referendum on secession was rejected in Austin, but they loved it in Dallas. Haley charts the course of progressive politics in Texas through the careers of Lyndon Johnson, Shirley Jordan and other civil-rights pioneers, and then the pendulum swings to the hard right with George W. Bush. Haley seems not to be a fan of the last, but he is harder on Bush’s predecessor as governor, Ann Richards, who threw away her minority and progressive constituency to try “to embrace conservatives who would never hug her back,” thereby violating the “cardinal rule of Texas politics: dance with the one who brung you.”
Haley’s highly readable book complements but does not replace Randolph B. Campbell’s more idea-driven Gone to Texas (2003), and it nicely updates T.R. Fehrenbach’s Lone Star, the standard overview.Pub Date: April 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-684-86291-3
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
