by Jay Winik ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 11, 2007
Thrilling in scope and elegant in style and argument—a certain bet to win numerous awards.
Wide-angle presentation of the philosophical, political and martial storms buffeting the infant American republic at the close of the 18th century.
In the years following the Constitution’s adoption, the United States weathered three domestic rebellions, a quasi-war with France and continued humiliations at the hands of Britain. It withstood the unexpected emergence of political parties and the most contentious election in its history (sharply chronicled in Edward J. Larson’s A Magnificent Catastrophe, 2007). It managed an unprecedented, peaceful transfer of power between antagonists and witnessed the death of Washington, the figure most indispensable to the precarious American experiment. To explain fully the nature and extent of the young nation’s peril and the reasons for its birth and unlikely survival, Winik (History and Public Policy/Univ. of Maryland; April 1865: The Month That Saved America, 2001, etc.) examines the international zeitgeist, especially forces at work in France and Russia. He explains the era’s unusual fluidity, the surprising intertwining of people and events illustrated by spot-on portraits of the Enlightenment’s greatest men and women, especially those—e.g., Franklin, Jefferson, Talleyrand, Lafayette, Gouverneur Morris, John Paul Jones, Citizen Genet, Thaddeus Kosciuszko—who played important roles on more than one continent. His painterly prose catches Napoleon, Potemkin and Russian General Suvorov at war and the likes of Mirabeau, Hamilton and Adams thinking their way into the next century. Marvelously varied scenes in this sweeping narrative range from Catherine the Great’s tour of the Crimea to the backwoods Whiskey Rebellion, from the dinner table at Mt. Vernon to the Ottoman Sultan’s seraglio, from the glittering court of Louis XVI to Marat’s bathtub and Robespierre’s appointment with the guillotine. Winik effortlessly condenses impossibly large events—particularly the French Revolution, whose lofty ideology and bloody effusions shaped so much—all in service of his grand thesis: that this crucial decade of despotism, rebellion, war and democracy accounts for the nation—indeed, the world—we’ve inherited.
Thrilling in scope and elegant in style and argument—a certain bet to win numerous awards.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-008313-7
Page Count: 688
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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