A minor footnote in Civil War history.
A modest tale of an immodest 19th-century woman who crossed both enemy and gender lines.
Sarah Emma Edmonds took off running from New Brunswick when her farmer father decided to marry her off to a neighbor. And when she stopped running, she stole a page from a favorite novel, Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain, and disguised herself as a man—not to join a pirate crew but to sell books door to door. She got away with the ruse and earned nearly a thousand dollars, a small fortune for the time. When the Civil War began, Emma put the pants back on and joined a Union regiment. That, writes Washington attorney Gansler, was not entirely unusual: “The exact number of cross-dressing soldiers in the Civil War is not known, but is estimated to be between 250 and 500.” Other aspects of Emma’s career as the soldier named “Frank Thompson,” however, were rare. While working as a nurse, she was found out by a fellow soldier, one Jerome Robbins, who did not reveal her secret; the fraught relationship that ensued lasted for years and occasioned plenty of heartache, but Robbins kept mum even as Emma stretched her talent and disappeared behind enemy lines, now disguised as a slave. By Gansler’s account, there is not much proof that Emma acted as a spy except for what Emma herself wrote in her postwar memoir, Nurse and Spy, which is not always trustworthy; as Gansler writes, Emma’s tales of adventure “were—and are—impossible to verify, but, true or not, they added a great deal of drama to the book.” Still, there seems little reason to doubt Emma’s word, especially given the testimony of others in her regiment, and the injuries she suffered in service were very real.
A minor footnote in Civil War history.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4280-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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