A predictable right-wing slant on American history.
Schweikart (History/Univ. of Dayton; What Would the Founders Say?: A Patriot’s Answers to America’s Most Pressing Problems, 2011, etc.) and Dougherty (co-author: The Patriot’s History Reader: Essential Documents for Every American, 2011) pen a conservative paean to American exceptionalism.
In 2004, Schweikart published A Patriot’s History of the United States (co-authored with Michael Allen) as a conservative response to Howard Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States. This similarly titled book has a narrower focus, filtering a half-century of American history—from 1898 to 1945—through a right-wing lens. The authors focus on American involvement in both World Wars and how American virtues, particularly free-market capitalism, helped to win them. An overarching theme is the idea of American exceptionalism, that the United States is a “shining city upon a hill” above all others. The book is aimed at a hard-core Republican audience, so while it is extensively sourced and footnoted, it is steeped in conservative dogma. The authors label progressivism as “one of the most destructive forces since slavery” and Woodrow Wilson as a “self-appointed messiah,” and the phrase “economic justice” appears only in ironic quotation marks. The authors even paint Warren G. Harding, consistently ranked by many historians as one of the worst presidents in American history, as a thoughtful and capable leader. They also discount criticism of Japanese-American internment during World War II, implying that it was justified by FBI-gathered evidence—though they grudgingly note that “Japanese-Americans’ life in the camps was no picnic.”
A predictable right-wing slant on American history.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59523-089-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Sentinel
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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
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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