A masterful and engaging account of the Civil War from the perspective of the soldiers who fought it, by the author of Custer (1996) and General James Longstreet (1993). Wert examines two brigades, one each from North and South, that found themselves at such battles as Manassas Junction (Bull Run), Fredericksburg, Sharpsburg (Antietam), Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg—battles that were vividly recounted at the time in memoirs, letters, and other firsthand reports. The Stonewall Brigade, from Virginia, received its name because of the leadership of Brig. General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson; the Iron Brigade was made up of men from Wisconsin and Michigan. Wert covers the recruitment, training, and initial deployment of each unit. But more important than these military details is the light he sheds on the reasons why men are drawn to fight in a war that is sure to be bloody (—We are in the midst of a great revolution,” wrote one Southern officer of his people’s fight “to maintain their rights—). Throughout the account, the words of enlisted men and officers dominate the narrative, and this firsthand testimony helps create a history that is far more vivid than any remote account could be. Wert skillfully interjects his own voice only when needed to guide the tale along. The voices he brings back to tell of the war’s progress and its rigors are voices of frustration (aimed at their leaders), fear, and homesickness mixed in with a healthy dose of everyday concerns; in their immediacy, they leap across the gap of 130 years that separates us from their era. Wert writes history the way it ought to be written: with clear prose, a deep understanding of his sources, and with the voices of ordinary men—all of which make the events as real to us as if they had only happened yesterday. (13 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-82435-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
Categories: HISTORY | MILITARY | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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