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
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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