A delightfully convincing case that Washington was history’s least ruthless and most successful revolutionary.
A provocative biography arguing that George Washington’s greatest accomplishment was guiding a rare revolution that turned out well for the revolutionaries.
Veteran historian O’Connell (Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman, 2014, etc.) reminds readers that most subsequent revolutions featured mass murder and ended in tyranny. In the first half of the book, the author travels familiar ground but does it with insight and wit. An unapologetic patrician, Washington yearned to scale Virginia’s aristocracy and Britain’s military. He succeeded in the first, becoming a leading figure in the French and Indian War and marrying Virginia’s richest widow. His failure, despite aggressive lobbying, to receive a royal commission was Britain’s first great mistake. A member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses, he dutifully supported opposition to Britain’s clumsy attempts to tax the colonists. By the time fighting broke out in 1775, everyone knew that Washington wanted to lead the army because he arrived at the Continental Congress in full dress uniform. Modern historians snicker, but it resonated with contemporaries, already impressed by his dignity, modesty, and reputation. He was the unanimous choice. O’Connell points out that Britain had long been crushing rebellions in Ireland and Scotland and saw no reason to change tactics in America. Even discounting patriot propaganda, looting and rape were common, prisoners were treated badly, and commanders known for cruelty were mostly British. Scholars wonder at his deference to the ineffectual Continental Congress. As generalissimo with a loyal cadre, he could have taken charge at any time but never did and expressed outrage when others suggested it. “He fervently believed in his own high-mindedness and was determined to conduct himself accordingly,” writes the author. “Nothing compromises morality like a long, violent revolution, and George Washington…remained a bulwark of decency, a remarkable achievement and possibly his greatest contribution to the Glorious Cause.”
A delightfully convincing case that Washington was history’s least ruthless and most successful revolutionary.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9699-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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
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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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