A fascinating study of an intriguing case. (15 pages of photos)
The true significance of the “Almanac Trial” is revealed by historical detective and novelist Walsh (Midnight Dreary, 1998, etc.) in this engrossing account of how history is made and lost.
In November 1857, less than a year before the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the lawyer and would-be senator from Springfield, Illinois, received a request he felt he had to honor. It was the dying wish of an old friend, James Armstrong, that Lincoln represent his son, who was on trial for murder. Lincoln was not, in fact, an especially good criminal defense attorney: Walsh documents that, prior to the Armstrong case, when faced with a client’s certain guilt, Honest Abe would either pull out of the defense or end up doing such a half-hearted job that the accused would get convicted anyway. One defense witness in the Armstrong case hinted broadly at the guilt of the defendant by stating that “he knew too much” to be of much use and, after the trial, told a juror that he had seen the defendant commit the crime. (This last delicious tidbit was uncovered by an amateur historian 50 years later, but it has been hitherto ignored.) No one knows if Lincoln thought his client was guilty, but if he did, it didn’t show. He gave his client a tough, artful defense, which included consulting an almanac to discredit a prosecution witness who claimed that he saw the murder clearly because the moon was high in the sky. (The almanac showed that the moon was lower on the horizon.) In considering what Lincoln might have known about the case, Walsh wonders, “which is more in order for what he did, censure or sympathy?” But his telling of the conflict between honesty and loyalty that Lincoln likely faced is clearly sympathetic. Perhaps it is simply the contemporary climate that leads Walsh to ask this question—as if the story he has told is not interesting enough.
A fascinating study of an intriguing case. (15 pages of photos)Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-22922-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
Aly delivers again, this time expanding his lens outside of Germany to offer further revelations about the Holocaust.
The award-winning German author dips into his vast archive of resources to produce a major work on anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism has been around for centuries. Though occasionally somewhat dormant, usually during times of fiscal strength and political peace, it always returns to rear its ugly head, each time spelling disaster for Jewish populations. Aly—the highly respected historian of the Holocaust who won the 2007 Jewish Book Award for his excellent Hitler's Beneficiaries—examines the period of 1880 to 1945 to show how, why, and in what forms anti-Semitism increased sufficiently to support the Nazi concept of the Final Solution. The author ranges widely across Europe, examining Russia, Romania, France, and Greece as well as Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, and other less-explored locales. “There is no way we can comprehend the pace and extent of the Holocaust,” writes Aly, “if we restrict our focus to the German centers of command.” While Jews were restricted from many jobs, they applied all their strength and determination to areas that were permitted, such as pharmacology, medicine, and journalism. Governmental actions began with bans on Jews serving municipalities and joining trade associations, and they also experienced limited access to education. After World War I, the concept of self-determination morphed into a brand of nationalism and misguided “racial theory” that led to increased animosity and violence. “Insofar as gentiles in the first half of the twentieth century pressed for Jews to be partially or completely stripped of their civil rights or insisted they be shipped off to somewhere outside Europe,” writes the author, “they were motivated by [an] obsessive anxiety: the fear of a supposedly overwhelming power and the real intellectual and economic agility of a small, precisely delineable ‘foreign’ group.” Though the gruesome subject and detail are sometimes tough to swallow, readers should forge ahead, relishing the author’s incredible research and singular scholarship.
Aly delivers again, this time expanding his lens outside of Germany to offer further revelations about the Holocaust.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-17017-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | HOLOCAUST | JEWISH | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The...
Former Secretary of State Clinton tells—well, if not all, at least what she and her “book team” think we ought to know.
If this memoir of diplomatic service lacks the preening self-regard of Henry Kissinger’s and the technocratic certainty of Dean Acheson’s, it has all the requisite evenhandedness: Readers have the sense that there’s not a sentence in it that hasn’t been vetted, measured and adjusted for maximal blandness. The news that has thus far made the rounds has concerned the author’s revelation that the Clintons were cash-strapped on leaving the White House, probably since there’s not enough hanging rope about Benghazi for anyone to get worked up about. (On that current hot-button topic, the index says, mildly, “See Libya.”) The requisite encomia are there, of course: “Losing these fearless public servants in the line of duty was a crushing blow.” So are the crises and Clinton’s careful qualifying: Her memories of the Benghazi affair, she writes, are a blend of her own experience and information gathered in the course of the investigations that followed, “especially the work of the independent review board charged with determining the facts and pulling no punches.” When controversy appears, it is similarly cushioned: Tinhorn dictators are valuable allies, and everyone along the way is described with the usual honorifics and flattering descriptions: “Benazir [Bhutto] wore a shalwar kameez, the national dress of Pakistan, a long, flowing tunic over loose pants that was both practical and attractive, and she covered her hair with lovely scarves.” In short, this is a standard-issue political memoir, with its nods to “adorable students,” “important partners,” the “rich history and culture” of every nation on the planet, and the difficulty of eating and exercising sensibly while logging thousands of hours in flight and in conference rooms.
Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The guiding metaphor of the book is the relay race, and there’s a sense that if the torch is handed to her, well….Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5144-3
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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