A carefully argued account of the general whom Robert E. Lee affectionately called ``my old war horse''—the same man who in the mythology of the Lost Cause became the scapegoat for the failure of Confederate arms at Gettysburg. Commander of the First Corps in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, Longstreet (1821-1904) was not only Lee's senior officer but his most reliable—even more so, Wert (Mosby's Rangers, 1990) says, than Stonewall Jackson. Described by a colleague as ``a rock in steadiness when sometimes in battle the world seemed flying to pieces,'' Longstreet served at First and Second Manassas, the Seven Days campaign, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chicamauga, the Wilderness, and the surrender at Appomattox. Lee depended on his counsel, except at Gettysburg, when three times Lee rejected Longstreet's advice not to make the fateful frontal assault. Although ostensibly covering Longstreet's entire life, Wert concentrates on the general's Civil War record, explaining the personality quirks and decisions that made the general, so fearless and beloved during the war, such a lightning rod of controversy in its aftermath. Longstreet excelled at Second Manassas, as well as at Fredericksburg, where his network of trenches, fieldworks, and artillery sealed the doom of thousands of Federals. But unlike Lee, Longstreet questioned the value of the tactical offensive and would risk his men's lives only in a carefully planned attacks with reasonable chances for success. Wert shows that Longstreet's warnings of disaster at Gettysburg were borne out—and he demonstrates that, except for one brief lapse, Longstreet carried out Lee's orders vigorously despite his misgivings. Longstreet's troubles resulted from his postwar decision to join the Republican Party—which made him the Benedict Arnold of the South—and his too-late, too-self-serving defense of his record in his memoirs. A fair, though not uncritical, reappraisal of one of the Civil War's great but maligned soldiers. (Twelve maps, 16 pp. of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-70921-6
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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