Here, social-historian Bodnar (Indiana Univ.) offers a moderately enticing analysis of the dynamic between national agendas and local attitudes as it surfaces in public ceremonies and commemorations. Bodnar first offers an overview of the interaction in American history between official culture, or the manifestations of state interest, and ``vernacular culture,'' the particular emphases of local and ethnic groups. These are the poles between which activity surrounding national holidays, anniversaries, and the construction of monuments is torn in Bodnar's formulation, with the recent example of the Vietnam Memorial cited as a resurgence of the vernacular over the official, of individual sorrow and loss over patriotic pride. Turning to specific communities in the Midwest, where immigrant groups provided a significant percentage of the population in this century, shifts in rural Swedish, Norwegian, and Mennonite celebrations in the last hundred years come under scrutiny, as do changes in ethnic-flavored civic events in Indianapolis and Cleveland. Official control of displays of public memory in the region is seen to increase with the century's advance, when patriotic passions inflamed by war and the ideology of the melting pot gain the upper hand. The existence of the National Park Service as a cadre of professionals dedicated to the control of national landmarks and commemorative events becomes the supreme example here of the institutionalization of that trend. Ponderous, although well-researched, and suffering also from being intuitively obvious, to the extent that anyone seeking revelation as to how a national identity is forged, and stamped on its citizens, will be disappointed. (Fifteen halftones—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-691-04783-9
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
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
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
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
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