Princeton historian McPherson has produced what is unapologetically—in heft, in physical design, in the use of myriad headings and subheadings—a high-class undergraduate textbook. It does not so much supplant The Civil War and Reconstruction (Rev. 1969), by J. G. Randall and David Donald, as offer a worthy alternative—incorporating not only recent research findings but also far more detail on non-political matters and much quotation from contemporary and other sources. (McPherson's previous works—The Struggle for Equality and The Negro's Civil War—have made notable use of documentary material.) But, jam-packed with information, it is much more a book to learn from than a book to read. Most interesting in the larger scheme of things is the section on pre-Civil war currents—the modernizing, reformist Yankee Protestant ethos; the contrasting Southern socioeconomic order ("Herrenvolk democracy"); the anti-slavery movement ("the most modernized sector of the economy") and the proslavery counterattack (the "siege mentality," the wage-slave theme, the cavalier image). Moving into the war, McPherson pauses to explain "the process of raising a three-year regiment" and the specific advantages of the newly-perfected rifle; the outstanding feature of the material on the war itself—one not to be disparaged—is probably the maps. To that must be added—reflective of the whole—McPherson's attention to the role of blacks (the debate over their recruitment, the conditions under which they served). On Reconstruction—which he extends to 1890—McPherson is precise and pointed. Klansmen renegades? Not so: "Klansmen came from all social classes and their leaders were often prominent men or the sons of prominent men. . . . Their hit-and-run guerrilla tactics made them, in effect, a paramilitary arm of the Southern Democratic Party's effort to overthrow Republican rule in the South." Less than compulsive reading—but a valuable book to have around.
Pub Date: Feb. 18, 1982
ISBN: 0072317361
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1982
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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