Although there are a few good points to pick out of this discussion, its subject might have been better served by a more...
A biography that sheds light on Maj. Gen. Arthur St. Clair (1734?–1818), a little-known Founding Father of the United States.
Although St. Clair fought in the American Revolution, served as president of the Continental Congress, was governor of the Northwest Territory, and gave much of his fortune to the American cause, he died in poverty and is little noted today. With this debut account, Phillips hopes to “tell the real story of this unrecognized American patriot.” Part One covers St. Clair’s Scottish heritage, including his connections with Freemasonry. Part Two follows him to the American colonies, where he served as a British officer, married in 1760, and retired from the British army two years later. He settled in Ligonier Valley, Pennsylvania, where he became a prominent landowner. In 1775, he accepted a commission in the Continental Army. Part Three covers the Revolutionary War, during which St. Clair participated in the Quebec invasion, helped organize militia, and took part in Gen. George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River. His effort to defend Fort Ticonderoga against a larger British force ended in retreat. In Part Four, set after the war, St. Clair became governor of the Northwest Territory for 15 years; after a disastrous campaign against Native Americans in 1791, his reputation never recovered. Part Five considers his ultimate legacy. Phillips does amplify St. Clair’s contributions and shows how he was likely scapegoated for failures that were not of his making; for example, he points out that poor supplies, rather than poor leadership, helped to doom the aforementioned Native American campaign. But the book’s chronology is hard to follow, with chapters circling backward and forward to repeat events, information, and various points. Also, Phillips makes editorializing judgments (“This duty-bound patriot, St. Clair, had the courage to make decisions that needed making”) and relies on dubious sources, as when he offers Rhode Island’s Newport Tower as evidence of a 1398 Scottish visit to America, when it’s actually the remains of a mid-17th-century windmill. Notes, a bibliography, and an index are included.
Although there are a few good points to pick out of this discussion, its subject might have been better served by a more scholarly approach.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4917-3782-8
Page Count: 328
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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