A fine work, as winning in its production as it is riveting in its contents, for everyone captivated by the Civil War.
The most significant parts of an extraordinary, recently discovered Civil War memoir, created in art as well as word, see the first light of day.
Sneden, a Canadian immigrant into Connecticut, joined the Union forces as a young man of 29, served in some of the worst fighting in Virginia, was captured and interned under the awful conditions of Andersonville, and lived to tell his tale. He told it in a postwar memoir (based on voluminous diaries, still lost) and a series of vivid, affecting watercolor drawings and maps, only recently found and only now becoming known. The watercolors, many of them reproduced here in beautiful renderings, record as few other known battlefield artworks the realities of fighting and imprisonment. Sneden's maps have the brilliance both of guides to land and structures and of true artistry. Fortunately, the written reports of what this soldier saw match the images captured in his art. They reveal a sensibility stripped by battle of any Victorian excess. Modern in their understatement, powerful in their simplicity and directness, they not only provide a record of the engagements and situations in which Sneden found himself—they sweep the reader along by their force and clarity. Bryan and Lankford (both of the Virginia Historical Society) have pared Sneden's manuscript memoir and selected its freshest and most compelling parts in a high act of editorial scholarship. The result is one of the most compelling additions to Civil War literature in many years.
A fine work, as winning in its production as it is riveting in its contents, for everyone captivated by the Civil War.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86365-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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