Though sometimes dry, a good summary of the run-up to our nation’s most destructive conflict.
Southern historian Lankford (Richmond Burning, 2002, etc.) traces the final steps to the Civil War.
He begins with John Brown’s 1859 raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Va. Troops led by Robert E. Lee quickly crushed his attempt to start a slave revolt, but the event polarized the nation. Northern abolitionists treated Brown’s death as martyrdom for a great cause; Southerners saw it as a barometer of Yankee hatred of their region. The Deep South took Lincoln’s election as its pretext to secede, but the slaveholding border states hesitated to abandon the Union. Lankford focuses on these states, above all Virginia, where the calls of loyalty and secession seemed equally strong in early 1861. In his first inaugural address, Lincoln, whom radical southerners saw as embodying all the forces aligned against them, tried to balance firmness and conciliation. Fort Sumter became the test of the president’s intentions. Secretary of State Seward was among the advisors who tried to convince him to abandon it; the South, they argued, would come to its senses if not provoked. After some hesitation, Lincoln decided to re-supply the fort. When his intention became known, Confederate artillery quickly forced the garrison’s surrender. From that point, the border states began to tilt toward disunion. A Baltimore mob attacked U.S. troops on the way to Washington, and Virginia’s secessionists gathered support from moderates such as Jubal Early, a staunch Unionist who went on to become a Confederate general. By the end of May, when Kentucky left the Union, U.S. troops were already in Virginia, and war was a foregone conclusion. Lankford cites contemporary newspapers and journals and letters from ordinary citizens of both regions, as well as from national leaders.
Though sometimes dry, a good summary of the run-up to our nation’s most destructive conflict.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2007
ISBN: 0-670-03821-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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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