These historical letters to and from a young North Carolina man shed light on the education and development of an antebellum planter.
Tristrim “Trim” Lowther Skinner (1820-1862) was the well-educated only son of Edenton, North Carolina, planter Joseph Blount Skinner (1781-1851). At age 20, Trim took over management of his father’s enterprises. He served in the North Carolina General Assembly from 1846 to 1848, married Eliza Fisk Harwood (1827-1888) in 1849, and died in the Civil War as a Confederate captain in the 1st North Carolina Infantry Regiment. These collected letters begin when 13-year-old Trim was at boarding schools in North Carolina and Philadelphia, continuing through his college years and beyond as he became more seriously involved in farming and other business concerns; the letters end soon after his marriage. As she has in similar volumes, Maillard (The Belles of Williamsburg, 2015, etc.) offers a scholarly and well-researched collection of letters from the Skinner Family Papers housed in the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, supported by a full scholarly apparatus including notes, bibliography, and index. Through these letters, readers learn in detail how a planter—and how a future Confederate officer—was made. Trim’s youthful curriculum sounds daunting: “I recite a lesson in Tacitus—one in philosophy—one in geography and one in greek,” [sic] writes 15-year-old Trim of his morning routine. He also reports on a duel in college that ended, somewhat ignominiously, without either party receiving much injury despite using guns and “3 or 4 pistols.” But Greek and dueling are put aside, and Trim’s adult letters chiefly reflect his close interest in crops, weather, and illness. In a typically detailed 1847 letter, he tells his father: “The worms have injured the stand of corn a good deal, and there is a long (1 1/2 inch) black caterpillar with smooth skin still at work.” The portrait that emerges is one of a hardworking manager always worried about crop prices, with little time for sipping mint juleps.
A useful and well-prepared addition to the scholarly research on pre–Civil War Southern planters.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 481
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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