A tense, richly detailed narrative of the American Revolution.
In 1781, discouraged after five years of war, George Washington finally saw the tide turn.
National Book Award winner Philbrick (Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution, 2016, etc.) reprises the protagonists of his last history of the War of Independence in a meticulously researched recounting of the events leading up to the colonists’ victory at the Battle of Yorktown. Focusing on naval and military strategy, Philbrick—like Tom Shachtman in How the French Saved America (2017)—reveals the critical contributions made by the French navy, a fleet that had improved substantially since its defeat by Britain in the Seven Years’ War. In France’s Académie de Marine, students were taught “to think of a naval battle in terms of a chess game rather than a brawl,” inciting, “for the first time in centuries, a whisper of doubt” in the “collective psyche of the British navy.” Although British commanders were determined to win, they were faced with passionate French military men, such as the young Marquis de Lafayette, the Comte de Grasse, and the Comte de Rochambeau, as well as recalcitrant colonists. British successes emboldened, rather than intimidated, patriots. “Broken up into thirteen largely self-sufficient entities,” the author asserts, “the United States was a segmented political organism that was almost impossible for the British army to kill.” However, American soldiers were in a weakened state, starving and unpaid. Washington, who had recently learned of Benedict Arnold’s betrayal, feared mutiny. But, Philbrick argues persuasively, Arnold’s treason actually strengthened the patriots’ resolve “by serving as a cautionary tale during one of the darkest periods of the war.” The author portrays Washington as an aggressive, undaunted leader—even when facing distressing personal problems—who emitted a “charismatic force field.” One British officer reported feeling “awestruck as if he was before something supernatural” in Washington’s presence. Philbrick, a sailor himself, recounts the strategic maneuvering involved in the many naval encounters: ships’ positions, wind direction and strength, and the “disorienting cloud of fire and smoke” that often imperiled the fleet.
A tense, richly detailed narrative of the American Revolution.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42676-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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