A brilliant book, likely to be for some time the last word on how the American map evolved.
A Pulitzer Prize–winner comprehensively documents America’s expansion—one audacious land swindle, one gunpoint accession, one bloody conquest after another.
Not until the 1840s did a journalist memorably codify the grandiose notion, traceable to the most illustrious among our Founders, of “manifest destiny.” By then, of course, fighting off threats from at least four European powers, the great American land-grab was well underway, with the “backlands” of the 13 original colonies already carved up by the Northwest Ordinance, Louisiana purchased and Florida seized. Still to come was the annexation of the Texas Republic and the Mexican War, which pushed our boundaries still farther south and west, and the muscling of Britain out of the Oregon Territory; there followed Seward’s Folly, the purchase of Alaska from Russia, the eventual annexation of Hawaii and the high-water mark of American imperialism, the Spanish-American War, resulting in the acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Covering all this and more, Kluger’s deeply researched, smoothly erudite narrative sickens even as it informs. Look away if you cannot bear the sight of America repeatedly betraying its professed ideals, building a nation on the backs of slaves, exterminating a native population. As his slyly sardonic subtitle suggests, Kluger (Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris, 1996, etc.) identifies few heroes in a story where even our greatest leaders (all cloaking their acts in the most high-flown rhetoric) succumbed to land-fever, safeguarding and enriching the republic by their unconstitutional acts, manufactured wars, repeatedly broken treaties and sometimes deceptive, other times arm-twisting diplomacy. Indeed, by the terms of Kluger’s relentlessly moralistic discussion, our greatest presidents were Cleveland, for his staunch refusal to sign off on a U.S.-led coup in Hawaii, and Carter, for his give-back of the Panama Canal. Still, by dint of his impeccable scholarship, Kluger has earned his virtuous tone.
A brilliant book, likely to be for some time the last word on how the American map evolved.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-41341-4
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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