A woolly, meandering analysis of commercial, rootless America in the Age of Jackson. Perry (History/Vanderbilt University) has homed in on narrower, more easily defined turf here than in his Intellectual Life in America (1984)—but hasn't produced a vigorously argued work. In tracing ``the origin of enduring tensions in what Americans hoped and believed about themselves and their society,'' he endeavors to show that our era's sense of change and loss is nothing new: For many Americans in the postrevolutionary period dominated by Andrew Jackson in politics and Ralph Waldo Emerson in literature, the past had become another country. But Perry records impressions of seismic shock unleashed by the entrepreneurial, ever-transforming nation, and doesn't record the change itself. Overhanging his account, and never answered satisfactorily, are several questions: Since American society from its beginnings was in constant ferment, what made the Jacksonian era so different? Exactly which conditions left observers so stunned at the rapidity of change? And why has Perry limited his analysis to foreign visitors (e.g., Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederika Bremer) and mostly northeastern intellectuals (Olmsted, Emerson, Thoreau, and abolitionist Theodore Parker)? There are a number of fascinating observations here—for instance, on the populist Jackson's desire to be considered a gentleman; on Tocqueville's brilliance of argument but lack of specificity about what he saw; and on the transient culture of peddlers, showmen, preachers, and gamblers. But Perry fails both to weave these points into a coherent framework and to draw compelling portraits of what Emerson might have called ``representative men'' of this turbulent time. During the 40-year period depicted here, the US declared its cultural independence from Britain and became a strapping giant of a nation that nearly destroyed itself over slavery. But one would never understand the sources of these creative and destructive tensions from Perry's history, presented without flair or logical unity.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-19-506091-1
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
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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