More proof that good things can come in small packages, this volume—along with two others—kicks off the publisher's ``Critical Issues'' series (consulting editor: Eric Foner), in which experts tackle historical issues whose consequences reverberate today. Not only do the authors of the first three volumes offer cogent overviews of their respective issues, but each is willing to climb out on a critical limb. Daniels (Concentration Camp USA, 1972), for instance, writing about the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WW II, states that ``this book has tried to explain how and why the outrage happened. That is the role of the historian and his book, which is to analyze the past. But this historian feels that analyzing the past is not always enough''—and so he takes on the question of ``could it happen again?'' and concludes that there's ``an American propensity to react against `foreigners' in the United States during times of external crisis, especially when those `foreigners' have dark skins,'' and that Japanese-Americans, at least, ``would argue that what has happened before can surely happen again.'' Similarly, Kirkpatrick Sale—in The Green Revolution (ISBN: 0-8090-5218-0; paper: 0-8090-1551-X)—summarizes the modern history of American environmentalism (which he sees as dating from the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring) and indicts ``a chemical industry that has subsequently produced some 30,000 chemicals of varying degrees of toxicity''), while Anthony F.C. Wallace—in The Long, Bitter Trail (ISBN: 0-8090-6631-9; paper: 0-8090-1552-8)—studies the legacy of Andrew Jackson's cruel Indian policies and declares that ``two hundred years of national indecision about how the United States should deal with its Native Americans have not come to an end.'' A promising beginning, then, to what looks like a very fine series with a cutting edge; future volumes will include Marvin Frankel on Church & State, Michael Hunt on How We Became Involved in Vietnam, and Betty Wood on Origins of Slavery in the United States.
Pub Date: July 12, 1993
ISBN: 0-8090-7897-X
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
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
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
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
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