An effective reach across time that is both poignant and entertaining.
Nearly one century ago, a year full of inspiring, thrilling, sad and sordid events left Americans eyeing the future with a remarkable optimism.
In his critically acclaimed High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World’s Greatest Skyline (2004), Rasenberger demonstrated a knack for capturing the zeitgeist in a nation determined to grow, and his unique talent is on display again in his take on a year for which he makes a compelling case: More than any other in the 20th-century’s initial decade, 1908 portended America’s destiny. Wealth was obscenely concentrated, especially after a private capitalist, J.P. Morgan, almost single-handedly yanked Wall Street back from the brink of collapse. There was the assault on the North Pole by two Americans—one eventually lionized, one dismissed as deluded or worse—and Henry Ford introduced the Model T, a piece of technology viewed by Rasenberger as unsurpassed in its impact on American society until the atomic bomb. An ebullient Theodore Roosevelt sent a fleet of U.S. battleships around the world, and the Wright Brothers publicly demonstrated (one tragedy aside) that flight was not only possibly, but here to stay. Not to mention a baseball season that began its final week with a triple dead heat for the National League pennant. The author admits that much of his information has already been covered in previous books. The murder of architect Stanford White, seducer of Evelyn Nesbit, for instance, put the insanity defense on the map and is an irresistibly seamy tale. A full-blown race riot in Springfield, Ill., was the northern urban precursor for violence in decades to come. But Rasenberger’s talent lies in his ability to synchronously thread it all together, as the year unfolds, with random happenstances—some wistful or intriguing, others obscure. It may not be foolproof—some readers may find color and texture, others nagging digression—but it’s continually engaging.
An effective reach across time that is both poignant and entertaining.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8077-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
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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