The letters of Lytle, a Union brigadier general with strong Southern ties who was killed at Chickamauga, edited by the curator of Historical Collections for the University of Pittsburgh Library System. Lytle, a general whom few but Civil War scholars and the most dedicated buffs buffs will have heard of, was an Ohio-born son of a US congressman who was raised as a Southern gentleman with strong ties to Kentucky. A volunteer in the Mexican War, he served with distinction and returned to run successfully for a position in the Ohio legislature, as well as to build his legal practice. He later ran for further office—with no success—notably, on a position of support for the Dred Scott decision, which denied blacks citizenship. When the Civil War broke out, Lytle was torn in his loyalties, but ultimately chose to support the Union. The letters compiled here offer a witty, bright look at the workings of the Union army, as well as Lytle’s relations with his family and friends. Although the descriptions of actions and life in the army are crisp and informative, one has to wonder whether readers really need to pick through the trivia of Lytle’s personal life to find the nuggets of history to which he offers testimony. Lytle’s account of his actions at Carnifex Ferry and Perryville are engaging, and his descriptionss of relations with Southern civilians are a unique facet, adding to what is known about the everyday life of Union officers and their interactions with Southerners. Well researched and clearly organized, but this one’s for the scholars, not the general reader, even among Civil War buffs.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8131-2108-6
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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