Essential for students of the Revolutionary era and a pleasure for cartography buffs.
The story of the American Revolution capably told through maps.
If it can’t be measured, the engineers say, it can’t be monitored. Just so, without knowledge of where an empire begins and ends, there can be no empire: thus maps, those indispensable adjuncts of nations. Brown, vice-chairman of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, and map dealer and historian Cohen (Mapping the West: America's Westward Movement 1524-1890, 2002, etc.) chart the seven years of Revolutionary War between Britain and its North American Colonies in a series of maps and related illustrations. The earliest major piece, the “Anti-Gallican Map,” sets the stage two decades before the Revolution, when Britain and France contested over the territory. As the authors write, meaningfully, “cartography always benefits from war or even the prospect of war,” and the multicolored map from December 1755, “a masterpiece of propaganda,” made a case for the necessity of war by depicting British North America as a civilized island in an ocean of French marauders and their savage Indian allies. The war with France over, maps then looked into the interior of the continent, where land-hungry Americans longed to go but the British crown locked away. If some of the maps are aspirational, most are highly realistic (or, as the authors put it, “candid”); the map of Boston showing the disposition of British troops at the time of what would become the Battle of Bunker Hill is a marvel of economic truth-telling. The excellent supporting artwork and Brown and Cohen’s elegant text help place these works in perspective in terms of both the development of the war from Fort Duquesne to Yorktown and the rise of modern mapmaking through the persons of unwitting heroes like Col. John Montresor, “the most able British soldier who served during the French and Indian War and the American Revolution.”
Essential for students of the Revolutionary era and a pleasure for cartography buffs.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-06032-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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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