A splendid rendering—filled with triumph, tragedy, and hope—that will please Lepore’s readers immensely and win her many new...
The celebrated New Yorker writer and Bancroft Prize winner tells the American story.
“A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos,” writes Lepore (History/Harvard Univ.; Joe Gould’s Teeth, 2016, etc.). In this mammoth, wonderfully readable history of the United States from Columbus to Trump, the author relies on primary sources to “let the dead speak for themselves,” creating an enthralling, often dramatic narrative of the American political experiment based on Thomas Jefferson’s “truths” of political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. The author recounts major events—the Revolution, Civil War, world wars, Vietnam, 9/11, and the war on terror—while emphasizing the importance of facts and evidence in the national story, as well as the roles of slavery (“America’s Achilles’ heel”) and women, both absent in the founding documents. Lepore offers crisp, vivid portraits of individuals from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine to Liberator writer Maria W. Stewart and preacher David Walker to contemporaries like “rascal” Bill Clinton, sporting a “grin like a 1930s comic-strip scamp.” “To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present,” writes the author, noting recurrent debates about guns, abortion, and race. “Slavery wasn’t an aberration in an industrial economy; slavery was its engine,” she reminds. Throughout, Lepore provides sharp observations (“instead of Marx, America had Thoreau”) and exquisite summaries: In World War I, “machines slaughtered the masses. Europe fell to its knees. The United States rose to its feet.” She discusses the “aching want” of the Depression and the “frantic, desperate, and paranoid” politics of today. Always with style and intelligence, Lepore weaves stories of immigrants and minorities, creates moving scenes (Margaret Fuller’s death in a storm off New York City), and describes the importance of photography and printed newspapers in the lives of a divided people now “cast adrift on the ocean of the Internet.”
A splendid rendering—filled with triumph, tragedy, and hope—that will please Lepore’s readers immensely and win her many new ones.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63524-9
Page Count: 960
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
Plodding narrative and slack writing plague this account of the fierce 1870s events that set the stage for the legends surrounding Billy the Kid. Hoping, in part, to discern the true character of William Henry Bonney, Jacobsen, a New Mexico assistant attorney general, relates the complicated circumstances and events comprising the Lincoln County War. Billy the Kid was one of the Regulators, a gang of ruffians (or, Jacobsen asks, were they concerned citizens?) aiding an English businessman, John Tunstall, in his feud with The House, the local political machine. Founded by Lawrence Murphy in 1873, The House was a store and a commodities brokerage that owned the only federal contracts within 200 miles. It was also a bank that protected its own monopoly, and Murphy was also the local probate judge. Tunstall, all of 24, dared to challenge The House by establishing his own ``store'' and ranch. He went into business with Alexander McSween, a former House attorney who'd been recently fired in a squabble over the estate of Murphy's late partner. Battle was joined in the courts, on the range, and in petty street fights. Both sides enlisted quasi-legal posses to harass and ``attach'' property belonging to the opposition; one such posse killed Tunstall in February 1878 while repossessing his ranch and cattle. The Regulators, working for McSween, retaliated by occupying the town of Lincoln. The ensuing Five Days' Battle, in which US Army troops supported The House, resulted in McSween's death in a hail of gunfire. Jacobsen follows the story through contemporary news accounts, court proceedings, and correspondence up to 1881, when Billy the Kid was killed by avaricious Sheriff Pat Garrett. Perceptive, methodical, and dull. (28 photos & 2 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8032-2576-8
Page Count: 470
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
An intriguing study for students of military culture and mental health.
A challenge to conventional wisdom about the military ignoring PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and suicide among troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Kieran (History, American Studies/Washington & Jefferson Coll.; Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory, 2014, etc.) never denies the seriousness of PTSD, TBI, and suicide among active and discharged veterans. However, he contends that critics of the military and federal bureaucracy often downplay the complexities of understanding the problems and finding effective solutions. In fact, he contends, implacable anti-war critics have unfairly used the psychological injuries for political ends. “In a climate in which anti-war sentiment was often dismissed with assertions that critics were not supporting the troops,” writes Kieran, “pointing out how the wars were harming those troops facilitated broader policy critiques.” Before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, research about PTSD, TBI, and suicide was based on the premise that deployments would be brief and that the same troops would not be ordered to return to the same war zones multiple times. When the nature of war changed, the military and the Veterans Administration had to recalibrate their policies and their research to react to new realities. As the author points out, those recalibrations take time and don’t usually conform to the urgent needs of combat veterans. Kieran’s research takes readers inside the medical arm of military services and civilian government bureaucracies, showing dedicated researchers and administrators trying to reach consensus about how to treat—and perhaps even prevent—serious mental damage and suicide. The author stresses that the disagreements about how to proceed derive from compassionate advocates relying on science-based research. Kieran rejects the commonly held belief that those in charge of warfare are dismissive of effective treatments for veterans. Throughout, the author provides memorable individual case studies. Much of the book, however, relies on dense academic research and a scholarly writing style, so general readers will need to pay close attention to digest the author’s arguments.
An intriguing study for students of military culture and mental health.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4798-9236-5
Page Count: 404
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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