This lightweight book is all about the dog, and, though more entertaining than the allegorical ALDD might be, it remains...
Yet another trickle in the constant flood of Lincolniana, this book reports on the qualities of the quadruped that filled the job of Lincoln family dog.
It is an old publishing yarn that the most salable books deal with the 16th president, medical practitioners or dogs. To guarantee a best-seller, title a book “Abraham Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog" or, in the trade, ALDD. Reporter and pop historian Algeo (Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk Was America's Favorite Spectator Sport, 2014, etc.) eschews the services of the doctor but tracks the dog’s life from the day in 1855 when Lincoln picked him up on a street in Springfield. The future president had engaged in hunting as a boy, but he soon gave up the practice. He was, it seems, an animal lover, while Mary Lincoln, on the other hand, had a bit of canine phobia. The lucky dog, no longer prey to dog catchers, was named Fido and became the prototype of all subsequent faithful Fidos, ministering to his master’s bouts of melancholy and frolicking with the Lincoln boys. Algeo reports on Honest Abe’s whiskers as well as his milking and marketing chores, and he notes how Lincoln bought medicine for Fido even as he ruminated about slavery. The author reintroduces us to a familiar cast of supporting players: good friend Josh Speed, Billy the Barber and law partner Bill Herndon. When it became apparent his master would run for president, “Fido’s carefree life would be forever changed,” and the 1860 campaign “would be sheer misery for Fido.” The dog remained in Springfield when the family moved to the White House. Not long after his former master was assassinated, Fido was killed by a knife-wielding drunk.
This lightweight book is all about the dog, and, though more entertaining than the allegorical ALDD might be, it remains Lincoln-lite.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-55652-222-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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