An inspirational work of history that touts such character traits as persistence, courage, faith, and compassion.
Portraits of five women who leaped into action during the Civil War—and whose contributions have proven essential and lasting.
Writer and marketing consultant Plumb (Your Brother in Arms: A Union Soldier’s Odyssey, 2011) chronicles the Civil War contributions of five women who moved into active roles that men had normally filled. A young Clara Barton, a teacher from North Oxford, Massachusetts, who had been working as a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., was horrified by the conditions of the military camps around the city and was motivated to begin a campaign to mobilize supplies for them. Her tireless efforts and advocacy eventually led to the establishment of the American Red Cross. Harriet Tubman, having made her way to freedom before the war along the Underground Railroad from Maryland to upstate New York, along with her family, became an active nurse and scout for the troops in South Carolina, operating behind enemy lines. She was known as “Moses of her people” and “General Tubman” for her work on behalf of black refugees, though she was never properly acknowledged or compensated by the military. Harriet Beecher Stowe, an ardent abolitionist, was outraged by the alarming national developments of the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act and wrote the hugely influential Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a righteous fury. Despite a suffocating marriage, Julia Ward Howe made a literary name for herself, spurred by the spectacle of troops marching to write the war’s anthem, “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” in 1861. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, had been tenaciously advocating for a national Thanksgiving Day, though it was ultimately President Abraham Lincoln who proclaimed the day on Nov. 26, 1863. In addition to his straightforward biographies, the author also looks at the women’s postwar years and offers extracts from their writings.
An inspirational work of history that touts such character traits as persistence, courage, faith, and compassion.Pub Date: March 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64012-223-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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