An engaging account that explores Franklin and the Somersettcase.
A history book examines the life of Benjamin Franklin with an emphasis on an anti-slavery case.
A practicing surgeon, Goodrich is passionate about history. But despite being an avid reader of history books, it was not until later in life that the author stumbled on the existence of the British anti-slavery case Somersett v. Steuart. Like most American schoolchildren, Goodrich had long been intimately familiar with the role of Boston in the origins of the Revolutionary War. While stories of “taxation without representation,” tea parties, and the Boston Massacre were well known, they did little to explain why so many Southern slave owners—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, for example—emerged alongside Bostonians as patriots. To the author, the 1772 Somersettcase became central to his understanding of the complexities of the American Revolution, as it exposed Southern fears of British abolitionism as well as inspiring a new wave of anti-slavery sentiments among patriots predisposed to the revolutionary “freedom” rhetoric. The book’s focus on Franklin, a onetime slave owner whose last public writing condemned slavery as antithetical to American values, is fitting. In concise, crisp chapters, the volume provides both an overview of Franklin’s life and his relationship to a larger network of Colonial and early republic figures. It is particularly adept at weaving Franklin’s personal story within the grand scheme of 18th-century international politics. The work’s strong point is a 50-page interlude halfway through that provides a comprehensive history of the Somersett case. (In a landmark ruling, an English court held that slaves were not chattel.) Though academic historians will note that the book does not add a new interpretive framework to understanding the Revolution or Franklin, Goodrich offers general readers an engrossing, well-written narrative history full of rich details. The volume’s use of dialogue as a means to advance the story may be ahistorical, but it is nevertheless fair to the memoirs and primary source documents the author relied on to build his narrative. The work also contains a remarkably thorough, annotated bibliography that delivers valuable commentary on primary and secondary sources related to Franklin, the Revolution, and the anti-slavery movement.
An engaging account that explores Franklin and the Somersettcase. (author bio, bibliography)Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
