A good general history that portrays the Lewis and Clark expedition and the expeditions of Zebulon Pike as parts of a larger struggle to establish power in western America.
Montgomery, a journalist known for his meditations on fishing throughout the American wilderness (Many Rivers to Cross, 1995, etc.), turns his talents to the nation’s earliest explorations beyond the Louisiana territories. In addition to retelling the story of Jefferson’s commissioning of Lewis and Clark to find a portage between the Missouri and Columbia rivers, Montgomery details Pike’s less familiar expeditions to the headwaters of the Mississippi and into Spanish New Mexico. The Lewis and Clark expedition and the Pike one are presented in opposition to each other: Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to expand US influence to the Pacific, whereas Pike’s journeys were ordered by General James Wilkinson in anticipation of the possible secession of the Louisianan territories (under Aaron Burr’s infamous leadership). Despite the disparate motivations behind the expeditions, Montgomery suggests that they both tried to conquer the territories through a spirit of aggressive adventure. This spirit earns the explorers the sobriquet of “gun-men.” The failures of Lewis and Clark to find a useful passage to the Pacific, and of Pike to incite a war with Spain, lead Montgomery to relate their stories in a bemused style. This tone deflates the cultural divinity imputed to the “gun-men” and suggests that the American West surrendered instead to the hard and unromantic work of the pioneers who would follow them.
Styled more as an adventure narrative than a traditional history, an enjoyable romp with Lewis, Clark, and Pike, along with an interesting introduction to the drama of Aaron Burr’s failed attempt to establish himself as emperor of the Louisiana territories. (6 b&w illustrations, 6 maps)Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-517-70212-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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An engaging, casual history of librarians and libraries and a famous one that burned down.
In her latest, New Yorker staff writer Orlean (Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, 2011, etc.) seeks to “tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine.” It’s the story of the Los Angeles Public Library, poet Charles Bukowski’s “wondrous place,” and what happened to it on April 29, 1986: It burned down. The fire raged “for more than seven hours and reached temperatures of 2000 degrees…more than one million books were burned or damaged.” Though nobody was killed, 22 people were injured, and it took more than 3 million gallons of water to put it out. One of the firefighters on the scene said, “We thought we were looking at the bowels of hell….It was surreal.” Besides telling the story of the historic library and its destruction, the author recounts the intense arson investigation and provides an in-depth biography of the troubled young man who was arrested for starting it, actor Harry Peak. Orlean reminds us that library fires have been around since the Library of Alexandria; during World War II, “the Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books.” She continues, “destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never happened.” The author also examines the library’s important role in the city since 1872 and the construction of the historic Goodhue Building in 1926. Orlean visited the current library and talked to many of the librarians, learning about their jobs and responsibilities, how libraries were a “solace in the Depression,” and the ongoing problems librarians face dealing with the homeless. The author speculates about Peak’s guilt but remains “confounded.” Maybe it was just an accident after all.
Bibliophiles will love this fact-filled, bookish journey.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4018-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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