McPherson follows up his sprawling Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War epic Battle Cry of Freedom (1988) with a real change of pace: sparkling analytical essays on how Lincoln effected the most fundamental transformation of American society since the American Revolution. Picking up Charles Beard's concept of the Civil War as a second American Revolution, McPherson examines how the conflict "left a legacy of black educational and social institutions, a tradition of civil-rights activism, and constitutional amendments that provide the legal framework for the second Reconstruction of the 1960s." The seven essays woven around this theme—originally either delivered as lectures or printed in such publications as the Hayes Historical Journal and Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association—are, as befitting their origins, more academic and analytically rigorous than McPherson's earlier great narrative. In the opening and closing pieces, the author convincingly takes issue with the postrevisionist notion that Jim Crow laws wiped out all the advances toward freedom made by the Civil War. On the contrary, he demonstrates, the Union victory forever broke the South's "Slave Power" over the federal government. As thoughtful as these contentions, and more original, are essays on how Lincoln masterfully employed parables and figurative language to define the war's purpose, how he gave the war revolutionary momentum with his demand for the Confederacy's unconditional surrender, and how, unlike Horace Greeley and William H. Seward, he pursued a central vision of the conflict. Skillful as McPherson is, however, he can't disguise the fact that, because these essays approach the same theme from shifting points of view, the anecdotes buttressing his arguments sometimes sound recycled. Filled with the author's usual erudition and lucidity of style—although one wishes for a little more steak to go with the sizzle.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0195076060
Page Count: -
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1990
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.
Largely autobiographical meditations and wanderings through landscapes external and internal.
National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Solnit (River of Shadows: Edward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, 2003, etc.) roams through a large territory here. The book cries out for an explanatory subtitle: “field guide” shouldn’t be taken as a literal description of these eclectic memories, keen observations and provocative musings. Four of Solnit’s essays have the same title, “The Blue of Distance,” but the first segues from the blue in Renaissance paintings to a turquoise blouse the author wore as a child, then to the blue of distance seen on a walk across the drought-shrunken Great Salt Lake. The second presents Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish explorer who wandered for years in the Americas, and then several white children taken captive by Indians; their stories demonstrate that a person can cease to be lost not only by returning, but also by turning into someone else. The third blue essay explores the world of country and western music, full of tales of loss and longing. The fourth introduces the eccentric artist Yves Klein, who patented the formula for his special electric blue paint and claimed to be launching a new Blue Age. How does it all fit in? Don’t ask, just enjoy, for Solnit is a captivating writer. Woven in and out of these four pieces and the five others that alternate with them are Solnit’s immigrant ancestors, lost friends, former lovers, favorite old movies, her own dreams, the house she grew up in, harsh deserts, animals on the edge of extinction and abandoned buildings. All become material for the author’s explorations of loss, losing and being lost.
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03421-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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