The former editor-in-chief of American Heritage revisits an epochal battle in naval history.
To some, the Monitor appeared “a mere speck, a hat upon the water,” but she was “the most complicated machine that had ever been built,” a combination of steam and iron whose revolutionary design so confounded naval architects that many doubted she would even float. Instead, when she appeared at Virginia’s Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862, the day after the Confederacy’s iron-plated Merrimack had already sunk two Union wooden ships, she preserved the Union blockade and immediately rendered every navy in the world obsolete. Popular historian Snow (I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford, 2013, etc.) builds toward these days of savage battle (thousands watched from shore), telling each ironclad’s story through the men who conceived, financed, sponsored, captained, and sailed it. Especially memorable are the author’s tightly focused profiles of the desperate Confederate Naval Secretary Stephen Mallory and his harried counterpart, Gideon Welles; indefatigable Connecticut entrepreneur and lobbyist Cornelius Bushnell, who championed the Monitor’s innovative designer, the brilliant, prickly John Ericsson; John Dahlgren, “the father of naval ordnance”; and the Merrimack’s squabbling co-creators, John Brooke and John Porter; Franklin Buchanan, the Merrimack’s aggressive, first-day captain, and the Monitor’s skipper, John Worden, who emerged from the four-hour battle sightless in one eye. Snow’s energetic account encompasses issues large and small, including discussions of arms and armament; the origin of the word “splinter”; the battle’s inconclusive end; a Southern joke of the day (“Iron-plated?” “Sir, our navy is barely contem-plated”); Lincoln’s special interest in the Union’s ironclad; the difference between shells and solid shot, the “mystery” of the Merrimack’s name; and the enthusiastic Monitor fever that swept the relieved, almost giddy North.
A few notable naval battles changed the course of wars, even history, but the clash at Hampton Roads transformed the nature of warfare itself and offered a glimpse of the “grim modernity” Snow vividly captures.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9418-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Categories: HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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