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THE MYSTERIOUS PRIVATE THOMPSON

THE DOUBLE LIFE OF SARAH EMMA EDMONDS, CIVIL WAR SOLDIER

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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