An exhaustive but engaging biography that plumbs the personality of William Tecumseh Sherman—and attempts to explain the Civil War general's personal and military decisions as arising from a psychological need for order and control. Marszalek (History/Mississippi State Univ.) contends that Sherman's rootless childhood—he lost his father at age nine and endured a separation thereafter from his mother and his siblings, while a charitable neighbor, Thomas Ewing, raised him—instilled in him an abhorrence of uncertainty and a craving for control. Sherman's letters make clear his ambivalent feelings about Ewing, mixing gratitude with a determination to make his way in life while taking charity from no one else. The Army, which offered an education without cost and advancement based solely on personal merit, made West Point an obvious goal for the young Sherman. While there's documentary evidence to support Marszalek's thesis about the psychological roots of Sherman's need for independence, the author is less convincing when he speculates that almost every personal and military act by Sherman—from his frequently absenting himself from his marriage to Ellen Ewing, his foster father's daughter, to his decision to fight for the Union despite his having lived in, and loved, the South—arose from his passion for stability. Much of Sherman's life can be explained simply by the fact that the general loved, and excelled in, the Army from the beginning, and revered the Union. Sherman was a born soldier, and during his brief periods as a civilian he seemed restless and dissatisfied. Finally, Marszalek argues persuasively that Sherman's scorched-earth tactics arose from his experience fighting the Seminoles in Florida, where he witnessed for the first time a war not between armies but between societies. Despite his sometimes heavy-handed psychobiographical theme, Marszalek succeeds in making this gruff, complex warrior come alive.
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1992
ISBN: 0-02-920135-7
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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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