An insightful glance at the unique cultural and social milieu of the Union soldier. Relying extensively on diaries, letters, and other primary sources, Mitchell (History/University of Maryland; Civil War Soldiers, 1988) discusses how the Union soldier understood his military experience. Antebellum ideology used the family as a metaphor for one's country, emphasizing the ``Republican Mother'' who educated her sons as self-sacrificing patriots; thus, ``the centrality of home and the family made them central to the Northern soldier's understanding of the Civil War.'' Soldiers—serving under officers who often came from the same town and who were thought of as equals—regarded their generals as fathers, their officers as elder brothers, and the war itself as a family quarrel. That men soldiered with lifelong neighbors and friends meant that the Union soldier brought the value of the home front into battle with him, giving war a sense of purpose: It also frequently weakened military discipline. Mitchell discusses in depth the Union soldier's distinctive view of manhood; his complex relationships with white Southern women—and with black soldiers, who were generally excluded from the American ``family''; his peculiar brand of religion; and his attitude toward death in battle. Mitchell sees as significant the Union focus in the late Civil War against Confederate civilian society, a focus that weakened the Southern soldier's will to resist: Observing that the Union soldier's strength was that he fought the war with home in mind, he notes that ``the Confederate soldier fought the war the same way, and, in the end, that proved part of his weakness.'' An eloquent revival of the simple verities of a vanished era- -idealism, patriotism, small-town parochialism, sense of family and manhood, and fear of failing in the eyes of one's community—that drove the soldier of the North. (Twenty-five halftones)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-19-507893-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
© 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
