An interesting collection of letters by a personal confidant of Robert E. Lee's that will appeal principally to Civil War buffs. Historian Tower does the same service for Col. Walter Herron Taylor that he did for Brigadier Gen. Arthur Middleton Manigault in A Carolinian Goes to War (not reviewed), rescuing him from obscurity. Taylor, born in 1838 to a prominent family in Norfolk, Va., was educated at the Norfolk Military Academy and briefly at the prestigious Virginia Military Institute. Leaving VMI after only a year, he took up a career in banking, which was interrupted by the onset of the Civil War. Having served in the volunteer militia, Taylor maneuvered a commission in the Confederate forces and soon found himself on the staff of General Lee. As his adjutant, he came to be on intimate terms with the revered general. He was privy to many of Lee's innermost thoughts and often shared the same blanket with him on bivouac. Lee also permitted him to sign documents in his name and used him to carry his most important orders to his subalterns. Following the war, Taylor resumed banking and played a significant role in the development of Virginia's railroads. He wrote two volumes about his wartime experiences, including a biography of his old commander. Tower assembles over 100 letters by Taylor. Most of them are to his beloved fiancÇe, Elizabeth ``Betty'' Saunders, whom he married, after Lee gave him special leave, in the desperate, waning days of the Confederacy. The letters reflect the young man's horror of war, his fervent belief in the Confederate cause, and his worship of the man he served. The details cross the line into the hagiographic as the vaunted Lee can do no wrong in the eyes the young officer. One senses from the volume that Tower shares Taylor's esteem for Lee, and it proves that indeed one can be a hero to one's valet after all.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-57003-021-9
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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