A sympathetic portrait of “Grant’s most dependable troubleshooter.”
A former reporter and AP editor examines the career of one of the Civil War’s great commanders.
An undistinguished West Point graduate, Lt. Philip A. Sheridan served eight years in the west before the outbreak of the Civil War. By the time the war ended, only Grant and Sherman outranked “Little Phil.” Battle by battle, Wheelan (Libby Prison Breakout: The Daring Escape from the Notorious Civil War Prison, 2010, etc.) charts the swift rise of the relentlessly aggressive Sheridan. Modest, energetic and brave, Sheridan was an innovator, using mounted troops both as an independent strike force and in support of infantry operations. His battlefield heroics, careful planning, use of intelligence and topographical information, and ability to improvise prompted Grant to conclude that he had “no superior as a general.” Yet Sheridan has been slighted by historians, receiving far less attention than his adversaries and even his subordinate Custer or his postwar scout William Cody. Wheelan attributes this neglect to the loss of all Sheridan’s papers in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Perhaps, but it’s also likely that his lengthy postwar career has made him a problematic subject for modern audiences. Sheridan was reviled in the South, where his strict enforcement of Reconstruction only revived memories of his wartime devastation of the Shenandoah Valley. An early proponent of total war, he believed reducing the Confederacy to poverty was the quickest way to end the bloodshed. Moreover, as commander of all U.S. troops west of the Mississippi, he used the same tactics against the Plains Indians, once notoriously remarking, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” Wheelan ably defends Sheridan, emphasizing the fierce sense of duty that also accounted for his stout protection of reservation Indians from rapacious agents, freedmen from ex-Rebels, settlers from Indians and Yellowstone National Park from poachers and corporate exploiters.
A sympathetic portrait of “Grant’s most dependable troubleshooter.”Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-306-82027-4
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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